How I Test a Firm’s Positioning in Two Minutes (With AI)

Leaders in expert-led firms keep telling me they’re worried about AI, and the worry takes one of two shapes. The first shape: when someone asks AI about their industry, their firm sounds identical to every competitor. The second: when someone asks AI about their industry, their firm doesn’t come up at all.

Both are real. Both come from the same underlying failure. And most of the advice being sold right now aims at the wrong layer. It focuses on phrasing and formatting tricks, as if the words on the page were the problem. They’re not. The problem sits underneath the words. Here’s the two-minute test I run before touching a single line of copy.

The test

Open your favourite AI tool. Paste in your homepage URL. Ask one prompt.

Summarize this firm in three sentences. Who they serve, what they solve, and what makes them different.

Then do the same with five of your closest competitors, one at a time. Lay the six summaries side by side. If they read like they could be swapped for each other, you don’t have positioning. You have a description. And AI just proved it in less time than a rebrand kickoff meeting takes to schedule.

What the test reveals

The test isn’t really about AI. It’s about specificity.

An AI summarizing a homepage does roughly what an in-market buyer’s brain does. It compresses. It reduces the page to whatever pattern it can extract quickly.

If the page carries a distinctive shape, the summary keeps the shape. If the page is a soup of category verbs and generic value propositions, the summary flattens it down to its category. “Helps companies grow.” “Brings senior marketing experience.” “Delivers results through a proven process.”

The mechanic predates AI. You could run it manually for decades. Print your homepage next to your competitors’ homepages and circle every phrase that could sit on any of them without changing meaning. Most homepages came back with almost nothing uncircled.

AI just automated the exercise. And it made the stakes commercial, because the same compression that produces a summary now produces the answers your buyers read.

The data behind the mechanism

This is where the test connects to revenue rather than vanity.

Ahrefs researchers Louise Linehan and Xibeijia Guan analyzed 863,000 search results and found that only 38% of citations in AI Overviews matched the top 10 traditional search results, down from 76% the year before. Even more telling, 31% of AI citations came from pages that didn’t rank in Google’s top 100 at all.

Read that carefully. AI isn’t favouring the pages that won the old ranking game. It’s surfacing content with something specific to say, from sources it recognizes as authoritative.

Cyrus Shepard’s analysis points the same direction. Traditional SEO fundamentals still drive most AI visibility, but the levers that matter have shifted toward evidence-rich content, brand-fact consistency across the surfaces you control, and named expertise. The keyword-density game is exactly the part AI walks past.

The rule underneath all of it is simple. AI amplifies what’s specific and flattens what’s vague. Feed it generic and it makes more generic. Feed it a specific point of view and it carries that point of view forward.

Generic copy fails in both directions at once. It gets flattened when AI summarizes your category, and it gets skipped when AI looks for an authority to cite. Specific copy wins both ways. Same mechanism, opposite outcomes.

I’ve seen this pattern before

In 2007 I wrote a manifesto called The Death of the Sales Letter. I wasn’t predicting the end of copywriting. I was calling the end of a form. The twenty-page long-scroll sales letter died because the surface it lived on was being replaced, not because copy stopped mattering.

Copy didn’t die. It moved.

A few years later the same argument ran through SEO. Firms that had bought SEO as a checklist got flattened once Google started rewarding actual expertise over keyword density. Firms with a genuine point of view rode the change up. I’ve written about how that plays out in organic visibility that compounds.

Now the argument is running a third time, with AI in the villain role. AI will replace writers. AI will kill search. AI will bury your firm.

What’s actually happening is narrower and more useful. AI is compressing writing that already sounded like everyone else’s writing. The “we help X do Y through Z” mad libs. The ten thousand landing pages describing the same problem in the same words. That copy was already dead. AI just dug the grave.

Every “death of X” announcement I’ve lived through was really the death of the generic version of X. The specific version kept going. The craft survives. The form changes. What survives is whatever was specific enough to survive the last change.

I ran the test on my own site

Fair is fair. I pasted michelfortin.com into the same prompt. Here’s what came back.

Michel Fortin serves growth-stage companies and expert-led firms that already have a real product and team but have hit a ceiling in their growth. He solves what he frames as an architecture problem rather than a marketing one, diagnosing the actual constraint behind symptoms like stalled revenue, leaking funnels, or poor search visibility, then rebuilding the underlying revenue system across marketing, sales, and customer success. What sets him apart is that he embeds as a fractional C-level executive (CMO, CRO, CSO, or CGO, whichever the diagnosis calls for) rather than just advising, backed by his proprietary Power Positioning framework, 35 years across 200+ industries, and AI-amplified execution at every stage.

Not perfect. I’d argue with a few word choices. But it has a shape.

A specific buyer. A specific reframe of the problem. A named framework. Concrete credentials. If I ran the same test on five generic fractional CMOs, most of those specifics wouldn’t survive the summary. The results would collapse into “helps companies grow.”

That’s the difference between a position and a description, spelled out by the machine.

The fix starts underneath the copy

If your six summaries came back interchangeable, the instinct is to rewrite the homepage. Resist it. Rewriting copy on top of undecided positioning produces better-phrased sameness.

The rule I’ve been teaching for years is the Rule of Three Ones. One buyer, one problem, one outcome.

The homepage names a single buyer specifically enough that the wrong buyer bounces. It names the single problem that buyer is losing sleep over. And it names the single outcome your firm actually delivers, in language the buyer would use themselves.

Do that, and the AI summary changes shape. The firm stops sounding like the category and starts sounding like itself.

The Rule of Three Ones is the compressed version of the Focus pillar in Power Positioning. Focus is the first of the four FAME pillars (Focus, Aim, Multiply, Engage), and it’s a decision, not a writing exercise. Which buyer are you built to close? What problem do you own? What can you defend when the buyer checks?

That decision then has to run through the whole business, not just the marketing site. I’ve made the longer argument in Why Positioning Is an Operating System. The short version: a homepage can only be as specific as the operating decision behind it. Vague copy is usually the symptom of a decision leadership hasn’t made yet.

What to do with your result

After the test, ask one follow-up question. Which of the six summaries would your best client have picked out of a lineup?

If the answer is yours, your positioning is doing its job. Keep feeding it. Publish the named frameworks and the specific evidence that AI systems and buyers can carry forward.

If the answer is any of the other five, don’t hire a copywriter yet. Run a positioning diagnostic first. In my own engagements that read happens through the IDEAL loop, which separates the symptoms (bland copy, weak AI visibility, thin pipeline) from the constraint (an undecided position). Fix the decision, and the copy almost writes itself. Skip the decision, and the rewrites converge back to the category average.

Most firms pay someone to rewrite the homepage. What they need is someone willing to say the homepage isn’t the problem.

The homepage is the mirror.

If your firm’s summary came back looking like a description, that’s the specific thing I diagnose in fractional engagements. Let’s have a chat.