Open Perplexity. Open ChatGPT. Open Google Gemini. Type in a brief as if you were a booker looking for a speaker on your topic, at your fee level, in your market.
See what comes back.
For some speakers, this is already working in their favour, and they may not have set out to make it so. The signals they have been putting into the market, the consistency of how they show up across every channel, the way third parties describe them when they feature them, have quietly added up into something that AI tools can cross-reference and surface confidently. For others, it opens up a channel worth paying attention to.
Michael Levey, Director at Speaking Office, manages speakers and advises on the commercial infrastructure of speaking careers at the highest level. From his vantage point on the other side of the desk, the shift is already visible.
“Bookers and clients are searching via AI,” he says. “If you want to come up in those searches, you need to make sure you have consistency across the board. That’s on LinkedIn. That’s on your website. That’s in content that you’re putting out.”
What AI tools are actually doing when they evaluate a speaker is cross-referencing every source they can find simultaneously. Where those sources tell the same clear story, the result is strong.
Where they diverge, or where some channels are telling a version of you from two years ago, the picture that emerges is harder to surface confidently. It is less about the volume of what is out there and more about the coherence of it.
Michael raises one dimension of this that tends to catch speakers off guard, even those who are already managing their presence carefully. It is not only what you are saying on your own channels that matters.
“If you’re being asked to do stuff for third parties, be that write a column, appear on a podcast, appear on a TV show, appear on radio, make sure that how they are promoting you is the same as how you are putting yourself out elsewhere,” he says. “There is nothing worse than having different things and it not all marrying up.”
The way a podcast host introduces you, the credit on an article you have written, the bio on a conference programme: all of these feed into the picture AI tools are constructing.
The website dimension sits alongside this. “It is one hundred percent key to create bespoke pages on your website that are tailored to the industry,” Michael says. “The more AI can scrape, the better it is.”
A generic presence is significantly less useful in this environment than content that speaks directly to the sectors and audiences you work with.
The speakers who are appearing well in these searches tend to share a specific quality. Their positioning is coherent everywhere it appears, on their own channels and on everyone else’s. There are no contradictions, no mismatches between what they say they do and what the broader web says about them.
In a market where AI is increasingly doing the first round of research on behalf of the booker, that coherence is becoming one of the clearest signals of a speaker who is ready to be found.
The upside is straightforward, and it starts with one question.
Speakers who already have strong positioning and a consistent presence across their channels are well placed, and for many that work is closer to done than they might assume.
So, it is worth asking: if a booker or client ran that search right now, would they find you, and would what they found give them a reason to get in touch?
