Within the next two quarters, someone on your board is going to ask about AI search. The question will arrive in one of three forms: 'Are we showing up in ChatGPT?', 'What's our exposure to AI search?', or, more pointedly, 'Why are our competitors being recommended and we're not?'. Whichever version lands first, the person who already has the answer wins the conversation. Most boards have not heard a structured walkthrough on this yet. The opportunity is to be the executive who delivers it.
This is the template. Five slides, ten to fifteen minutes, designed to leave a board with a clear picture of the exposure, the current position, and the specific ask. It is written from the perspective of the executive who needs to deliver it (CMO, VP Marketing, CEO at smaller companies) rather than the analyst preparing the data. Each slide section below includes what to put on the slide, three or four talking points, and what to avoid saying.
Why this is a board topic now
Three numbers earn this a board slot, and they are the only ones you need to anchor the framing.
- 58 percent of consumers have already replaced traditional search with AI tools for product and service discovery (Capgemini, 2025).
- 64 percent say they are ready to buy products AI recommends directly.
- Commercial-intent prompts trigger live web search inside AI assistants 53.5 percent of the time, compared to 18.7 percent for informational queries.
Translation for the board: the buying journey has moved upstream of your funnel. Your sales pipeline data is now lagging your AI visibility data. By the time low pipeline numbers show up in the quarterly review, the loss happened weeks earlier inside an AI conversation you can't see.
Slide 1: How buyers reach us has changed
What goes on the slide: one chart, one number, no clutter. The number is your category's specific buyer-AI-usage rate (cite Capgemini's 58 percent if you don't have your own primary data yet). The chart is a simple before-and-after of the buyer journey: traditional path (Google search → comparison site → your site) versus current path (AI assistant → named short list → direct conversion).
Talking points:
- The 18-month shift is structural, not cyclical. Google Search usage actually grew alongside AI search adoption; the total inquiry volume expanded, not migrated.
- Inside AI assistants, three to five brands are typically named per query. There is no 'page two'. Either you are named or you are absent.
- This affects the top of the funnel, not the entire funnel. SEO is not dead. The discovery channel above SEO is new.
Avoid: predicting the death of Google. The board has heard that prediction five times. The accurate framing is that AI search is an additional channel above the existing funnel, not a replacement for it.
Slide 2: Where we appear in AI answers today
What goes on the slide: a share-of-voice number across the four to eight major AI engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity at minimum; add AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Grok for full coverage). Format as either a single composite percentage or a small per-engine bar.
Talking points:
- Define share of voice clearly: the percentage of relevant buyer-stage prompts where your brand is named in the AI response. This is not vanity traffic; this is mention frequency on the queries that lead to revenue.
- Distinguish first-mention from any-mention. First-position recommendations carry disproportionate weight in what buyers remember and what downstream AI agents repeat.
- Show variance per engine. A brand may be 40 percent on ChatGPT and 5 percent on Perplexity. The aggregate hides the gap.
Avoid: presenting a single composite score without disaggregating per engine. The board will assume that one number is reliable. It isn't, and you'll get cornered on the next call when ChatGPT and Claude diverge.
Slide 3: Where our competitors appear instead
What goes on the slide: a list of three to five named competitors with their share-of-voice numbers next to yours. This is the slide that lands the urgency.
Talking points:
- Name the specific competitors. Specificity is what makes this real to the board. 'Some competitors' lets people deflect; 'Competitor X at 38 percent vs us at 9 percent' does not.
- Distinguish established competitors from new entrants you weren't tracking. New entrants in the AI recommendation set are a leading indicator of category share movement that takes 6 to 12 months to show up in pipeline data.
- Explain one specific reason a competitor is winning a slot you should hold. Usually it's review-platform health (G2, Trustpilot, Capterra) or inclusion in a category-defining 'best of' roundup. This sets up the ask on Slide 5.
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Avoid: defensiveness. The point of this slide is not to justify why you're where you are. It is to make the gap concrete enough that the next question is 'what do we do about it'.
Slide 4: What we're doing about it
What goes on the slide: a short list of three to five concrete initiatives currently underway, each with an owner, a start date, and a 30/60/90-day expected outcome. Even if some of the initiatives are 'about to start' rather than 'in flight', name them with the owner.
Talking points:
- Lead with the work that is highest leverage. Across the brands we monitor, that is almost always (a) review platform health on the one or two platforms your buyers use and (b) structured comparison content on your owned domain. These two move share of voice fastest in the 60 to 90-day window.
- Include monitoring as an explicit line item. The board needs to know there is continuous measurement, not a quarterly check.
- Be honest about what's not yet started. 'We have not yet addressed Reddit and YouTube. Q3.' That is a stronger position than implying full coverage.
Avoid: vague initiative names like 'AI optimization' or 'content refresh program'. The board has heard initiative theatre before. Specific work names with specific owners signal real intent.
Slide 5: What we need
What goes on the slide: the explicit ask. Usually one of three forms: incremental budget, a headcount decision, or a vendor approval. Make it singular.
Talking points:
- Tie the ask to a specific outcome on Slide 3. 'To close the 29-point gap with Competitor X in 12 months, we need [X].'
- Right-size the ask. The realistic budget range for mid-market AI visibility programs is 5 to 25 percent of existing SEO/content spend, not a separate net-new line. Frame it as a re-allocation, not an expansion, where possible.
- If the ask is a vendor decision, name the shortlist and the decision criteria. Don't ask the board to choose; ask them to approve a choice.
Avoid: presenting a menu of options. Boards approve one ask cleanly. Multiple options force the room into a discussion about which one, which is the wrong discussion. The right discussion is 'are we approving this or not'.
What to skip from the deck
Three things commonly find their way into AI visibility presentations and consistently get the deck challenged on the wrong terms.
- Vanity metrics. Total brand mentions across all AI prompts. Number of citations in any context. These are not pipeline signals. Stick to share of voice on buyer-stage queries.
- The model arms race. Slides explaining the difference between GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 are interesting and irrelevant. The board does not need to understand the technology to approve the budget.
- Vague timelines. 'Ongoing optimization' is not a timeline. 30/60/90-day milestones are.
Where to source the data
Slides 2 and 3 are the data-heavy slides. Without primary measurement, both slip into estimation. Three sources of varying rigor:
- Run a free check yourself before the meeting. The free AI visibility check runs your brand against the major engines in 30 seconds. Useful for a directional read; not sufficient for a board number.
- Aggregate from public market-share data for the macro slide (Slide 1). Statista, Capgemini, McKinsey, First Page Sage, Similarweb. See our AI chatbot market share post for a recent compiled set.
- Continuous measurement for the per-brand slides (Slides 2-4). This is what Honeyb is built for, but the methodology matters more than the vendor. Whatever tool you use, ensure it covers all major engines, runs daily, and reports per-prompt share of voice, not just any-mention totals.
Closing
The first executive in a category to brief their board on AI visibility frames the issue and the response. The second executive answers the question someone else already framed. The same applies to the conversation with your CEO, your founder, or your CFO. If you're preparing this deck now, run a check on your top 20 buyer-stage queries first so Slide 3 has real names on it. The free AI visibility check is the fastest way to put that data on a slide before the meeting.
