Nobody wakes up wanting your product.
They wake up with a problem. The accounting software fell over again at end of month. The board wants a number by Friday. The ute's due for rego and the gearbox is making that noise. Something happened, and now they're in-market.
That moment is the whole game. After 24 years in search and brand, and 214 clients advised, I've landed on one conclusion: the brands that win aren't the ones with the cleverest tactics. They're the ones that understood the buyer's moment better than anyone else, and built themselves around it.
That's what I mean by thinking in-market.
Most marketing talks to people who aren't buying
At any given time, most of your market isn't ready to buy. They're busy, happy enough with what they've got, or haven't hit the trigger yet. A lot of marketing budget gets spent shouting at them anyway, then someone wonders why the leads are rubbish.
In-market buyers are different. They're actively looking. They're asking Google, ChatGPT, their mates and their colleagues. They're building a shortlist and, just as importantly, looking for reasons to cross names off it.
If you only remember one thing from this post, make it this: an in-market buyer isn't looking for the best brand. They're looking for the safest good decision.
What is an in-market buyer actually doing?
When I map a buyer for a client, I look for four things.
- The trigger. What changed? A new job, a supplier that let them down, a deadline, a budget cycle, a bad experience with the thing they already use. Triggers tell you when intent starts, and they usually sit well before anyone types your category name into a search bar.
- The shortlist. Who are they comparing, and where did those names come from? More and more, the answer is "an AI told me", sitting on top of what reviews, forums, press and peers have been saying for years.
- The doubts. What could go wrong? What would make them look silly to their boss or their partner? Doubts kill more deals than competitors do.
- The justification. Who else has to agree, and what will they need to hear? A CFO, a co-founder, a spouse. Your buyer needs the words to sell you internally.
Get those four right and most of your marketing writes itself. Get them wrong and no amount of content will save you.
Five questions to get inside their head
You don't need a research agency to start. Grab your last ten sales calls, your reviews and your support inbox, and answer these:
- What happened in the week before they first got in touch?
- What were they using before, and what finally broke?
- What did they ask that we thought was obvious?
- What nearly stopped them buying?
- How did they explain the decision to someone else?
Use their words, not yours. If customers say "it just works with Xero" and your website says "seamless integration ecosystem", you've already lost the human answer and the AI one.
Where does AI search fit?
GEO, AEO, LLMO. I use the terms because that's what people search for. Honestly, I can't stand them, because they make it sound like there's a new trick to learn.
There isn't. An AI assistant is trying to do what a good mate does when you ask for a recommendation: give a confident answer that won't make it look bad. So it leans on the same signals a careful buyer does. Who's consistently mentioned. Who has the proof. Who explains clearly what they do, who it's for and what it costs. Who other people vouch for.
Google is heading the same way. On 15 October it announced that source links in AI Mode and AI Overviews will show up higher and more often, and that it's testing a dedicated spot at the top of some answers for the one or two official pages that complete a task. The answer engines are getting better at sending people to the source that actually solves the problem.
So the brands that get recommended are, almost always, the ones buyers already trusted as the safe choice. AI amplifies the reputation you've earned. It doesn't invent one for you.
That's why I don't start with the query. I start with the buyer. The query is just the bit of their thinking you can see.
What changes when you think this way?
This is the part most "AI SEO" advice skips. Thinking in-market doesn't just change your pages. It changes the business.
- Product: if the same doubt shows up in every third review, fix the product or the packaging before you write another blog post.
- Offer: risk reversal, clear pricing, a trial that matches how buyers actually evaluate. Make the safe decision obvious.
- Brand: be known for one specific thing at one specific moment, not vaguely good at everything.
- Service: onboarding, handover and follow-up are what people talk about afterwards, and what ends up in reviews and forums that AI reads.
- Social and content: answer the questions buyers ask at each moment, in their language, with proof.
Do that well and the rankings, the citations and the AI recommendations follow. Not because you gamed anything, but because you became the obvious answer.
Start here this week
Block out 30 minutes. Pick one buyer and one money moment: the moment that, if you won it more often, would change your year.
Write down the trigger, the three brands on their shortlist, their top three doubts and who else signs off. Then open ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode, and ask the question that buyer would ask, three times each. Note who gets named, and why.
That's your baseline. It's also the first three steps of what I call The INTENT Method: Identify the buyer, Name the moment, Test the answer. The other three, Engineer the offer, Nurture every surface, and Track and tune, are where the real work (and the real growth) happens. I'll unpack each of them here over the coming weeks.
Want your baseline done for you? Get your free Intent Score: we'll run the AI recommendation test on your money question and show you what buyers, and AI, see.
