How Whittingham Marketing is adapting to AI recommendations
Jordan Whittingham, founder of Whittingham Marketing & Consultancy, explains how the agency helps small and mid-sized businesses get found and chosen as AI recommendations become part of customer discovery. The conversation explores which tasks the business has handed to AI, why customer-facing content stays human, and how businesses can make their websites easier for AI tools to verify.
Use AI for editing, repurposing and admin, but keep the customer connection human: in one test, content showing real people drew roughly ten times the response of generated-style creative. For discovery, make your website easy to verify with direct answers, consistent details, prices and named people.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
I started with a second-hand laptop, five business cards and a shed at the bottom of my Nan’s garden as an office! No funding, no agency background. The consultancy grew by doing the work properly, and over time it became the core of the Whittingham Group because clients kept asking us to go deeper than marketing. What makes us different is that we run businesses ourselves – a large music school, an international e-commerce brand, software we built – so nothing we recommend is theory. We test it with our own money first, then bring clients what actually worked.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Depends what aspect of the group you’re referring to, but most of our marketing agency clients comes from being recommended – word of mouth, referrals from existing clients, and increasingly from AI. Roughly one in five new visitors to our e-commerce brand now arrives via the AI answer at the top of a Google search, which is a channel that barely existed for us eighteen months ago. Where do I wish it came from? Honestly, more of the same! A recommendation – whether from a person or a machine – arrives pre-sold, and I’d take one of those over ten paid clicks every time.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
Handed over: the production layer. Editing, repurposing, formatting, admin – one filming session now becomes weeks of content across our brands, work that would once have needed a team is now done so quickly and efficiently it’s mind blowing!
Went back: the content itself facing customers. We tested slick, generated-style creative against simple content showing the real people behind our brands, and the real people won by roughly ten to one on response. So the rule across every company became: AI does the production, humans do the connection. Nothing a customer experiences directly gets automated.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Yes, measurably. Beyond that one-in-five figure I gave earlier, the bigger shift is that people arrive already decided. ChatGPT, Claude and Grok now recommend us and our clients by name, so prospects turn up having effectively been told we’re the answer, and the conversation starts further down the line. A care home group whose seven websites we rebuilt for AI readability now has the most AI-crawled care home sites in their local areas. The referral has a new middleman, and most businesses haven’t noticed yet!
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Do: make your website boringly checkable. Rewrite headings as the questions customers actually ask, answer them plainly, show your prices, keep your details identical on every page, and put real named people with faces on it. That’s the whole trick to being quoted by AI, and almost none of your competitors have done it… yet!
Ignore: the arms race to pump out more AI-generated content, and every tool promising to automate your customer relationships. The moment every channel is full of machine-made sameness, the scarce thing is being verifiably human – don’t spend this year automating away the only advantage that’s getting more valuable. Stay personal, stay human!
Thank you to Jordan Whittingham and the team at Whittingham Marketing & Consultancy for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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