AI made content cheap. Trust got expensive.

How a small Australian baby brand rebuilt its marketing for AI search, and what it switched off.

An early AI video we made for the 5-in-1 Mama Cover looked great for about two seconds. Then you noticed the model was wearing it like an open scarf with loose ends. The real product is a closed loop you slip over your head. Any mum who owns one would have spotted it straight away. We scrapped it and rewrote the brief from the product page up.

That clip sums up the past year at Zoe Sage, the baby essentials brand my family runs alongside our dancewear store, Total Dance. AI made marketing almost free to produce. It also made customers much faster at spotting anything that feels made up. So we changed where we spend our time.

Buyers now ask a machine first

Parents used to type "best swaddle Australia" into Google and open ten tabs. More and more, they ask ChatGPT or read Google's AI summary and get one blended answer. Our job shifted from ranking a page to being the source that answer gets built from. Three changes made the biggest difference.

We put our facts where machines can read them. Our TOG sleep guide, one of our most useful pages, was a JPEG. Google could see a picture and nothing else. We rebuilt it as a proper table. Later, our store's AI chat assistant couldn't say whether our silicone feeding set was dishwasher safe. The answer existed, in a product data field the assistant doesn't read. Once we added it as a plain FAQ, the assistant had it. If a fact only lives in an image or a hidden field, assume AI can't see it.

One page per question. We had published more than 250 articles, and for swaddles alone we had 22 pages quietly competing with each other. The best of them sat around position 27 for "baby swaddle". Where one page clearly owned a topic, like our burp cloths collection, we sat around position 7. Now every question gets one clear home, and related pages link to it.

A real person behind the advice. Zoe Sage's founder, Bianca, is a mum of two who personally chooses the products. We gave her a proper author page and connected it to her articles in the page code, so search engines and AI tools can tell who is speaking. Her bio is upfront about her limits: she's a mum, and she isn't a midwife, nurse or lactation consultant. For safe sleep we point readers to Red Nose. Being clear about what you don't know builds more trust than sounding like an expert on everything.

Our rules for AI fatigue

People pick synthetic content within a second, and in the baby category one wrong detail costs trust you don't get back. So we wrote rules.

• AI video shows adults only, never babies or children.
• We write every word of every script. Words like "obsessed", "game-changer" and "holy grail" are banned.
• We only show what a product physically does. We never promise outcomes like "baby sleeps longer".
• Our chat assistant tells people it's a bot, never gives medical or breastfeeding advice, and hands refunds to a person.

We also said no to things. I asked for an Instagram bot to auto-like and auto-follow accounts. Our research said outbound liking and following no longer lifts your reach, and it reads as spam. Now a person approves every comment we post.

There's fatigue on our side too. Every tool now claims to be AI. We track what we spend on AI tools and cancel the ones that don't save real hours or catch real mistakes.

Where AI earns its keep

Our biggest wins have come in places customers never see. When we brought Google Ads in-house, an AI-assisted audit found our four "separate" Performance Max campaigns were all bidding on the entire catalogue and competing with each other. We also caught our own overnight content automation quietly deleting internal links we had added by hand. A daily check now puts them back.

That's the pattern. AI is a sharp analyst and a fast assistant, and it still needs a supervisor.

What hasn't changed

One of our biggest sales channels takes no ad spend at all: independent retailers who stock us through wholesale. A boutique owner who has handled our muslin and tells a customer "I use this one" is something no algorithm can fake. Those relationships now get more of our attention.

Use AI where the customer can't see it, and be human where they can. Make your facts easy for machines to read, give every question one good answer, and keep a real person's hands on the wheel.

Business Spotlight features are contributed by operators in our network and reflect their own experience and views. Intrigue Digital does not verify the internal metrics or figures reported and they should be read as the author's own account, not independently audited results.