AI slop is killing brands. Consistency is how you get recommended (2026)

AI slop is killing brands. Consistency is how you get recommended

Simon Young talks with creative director Andy Price about AI slop, lazy prompting, and why answer engines punish inconsistent brands.

The danger of "just good enough"

AI can now do the work of a whole agency overnight. That is not the risk. The risk is people treating the first draft as the finished piece.

Andy spent 34 years as a creative director in UK advertising. He has seen clients try to write their own ads, the Canva years of samey templates, and now a flood of AI posts that local audiences call out in Facebook groups. The pattern is the same: skip the brief, skip the craft, and the work looks synthetic.

Brief the bots like a team, not a vending machine

When Andy rebuilt the Question.marketing identity, he did not take the first Lovable output. He briefed ChatGPT, Claude and Grok like staff. He asked for positioning, rationale, brand guidelines and layout options. The first serious pass took about four hours. Refining it still took days. That is the point: AI collapses the waiting, not the thinking.

You only get out what you put in. "Just good enough" dilutes the brand until nobody, human or machine, knows what you stand for.

Why AI drops inconsistent brands

Simon has been talking to businesses that are suddenly invisible in AI answers. One client already appears in Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot, yet still has conflicting facts across blogs and PDFs. Another example from Simon's own assets: question.marketing with a capital M on one social profile and a small m on another. The bot asked which was correct. When two answers disagree, the safe move for an answer engine is to leave you out.

Andy has banged on about consistency for decades. Clients get bored of their own logo lockups. Customers do not. AI just made the cost of hopping around measurable.

From citation to being chosen

Six months ago you clicked ten sites and made up your own mind. Now a fan-out query pulls more sources than any person could read and returns a citation, then a recommendation. Simon's view for 2027: share of voice is not enough. Brands need to be chosen.

That only happens if you are consistent, trusted, and spoken about well by third parties. Agentic sales will go further. When a conversation looks like a buying moment, the system will only risk introducing advertisers it can defend. Bad or inconsistent reviews become a hard stop.

Clean your history before someone else writes it

A Hong Kong client audit found old directors, leavers still listed, and a former contact under investigation elsewhere still attached in public records. Thirty years of brand history does not disappear because you moved on. You have to publish a clear source of truth and teach the models what is current.

Simon also warns that competitors will start poisoning results with planted inconsistencies. Brands that do not lock their facts will lose by default.

What to do this week

1. Pick one spelling, one lockup, one set of numbers, and make every page match.
2. Write down what only you know, and put it where models can read it.
3. Stop publishing the first AI draft. Brief it, challenge it, then ship.
4. Ask Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot the question your best customer would ask. Note who they name, and who they skip.

Watch and listen

Watch the full video on YouTube. Listen to the podcast episode on Will AI Recommend You? on Buzzsprout.

Notes on figures

Simon refers to the Daily Mail losing "80, 89%" of traffic to AI answers. The published DMG Media figure is an 89% drop in desktop click-through rate when an AI Overview is present (25.2% to 2.8%), with a similar mobile drop. Later commentary described an 80 to 90% CTR hit on affected queries, while overall traffic impact can still be low single digits because AI Overviews do not appear on every keyword. See sources in the YouTube description.

The "over 900" AI visibility tools figure is from Simon's own ongoing research for Question.marketing's State of AEO and GEO Software work.

About the speakers

Simon Young runs Question.marketing and hosts Will AI Recommend You? Andy Price is a creative director with 34 years in advertising and marketing, Simon's business partner, and co-author of their earlier brand book.