WASHINGTON – Dustin Lloyd, a US Democratic primary candidate for Missouri’s state legislature, was a well-known member of his community when he started his political campaign.

But there was one important group that didn’t seem to know him at all: Artificial intelligence chatbots.

If voters quizzed a chatbot like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini about Lloyd, they would find only basic information that failed to convey his focus on helping small businesses.

Fortunately for Lloyd, there was a fix. He tweaked his online presence, publishing a Q&A about himself on his campaign website. Later, when the chatbots were quizzed again, they dutifully connected that personal history to his policy goals.

Editing AI’s output proved to be easier than he imagined. Since then, Lloyd said, “I’m constantly working on it every day.”

Candidates have long had to worry about their reputations among voters. Now, they have to worry about what AI thinks about them too. And a new industry has sprung up to help them navigate this world.

Lloyd, 33, relied on a report on his AI presence from CampSight, a tool launched in June by Run for Something Action Fund, a progressive group that recruits young candidates to run for office. It determined that Lloyd’s website and his presence on Wikipedia and Ballotpedia – sites on which voters regularly find information about political figures – were lackluster, advising him to make changes. It even recommended posting threads on Reddit so that the chatbots would begin including information from the online forum in their responses.

“Everyone’s just grasping for some sort of tool to at least inspect these results and ideally influence them,” said Jordan Haines, chief technology officer for Run for Something.

The industry, known as answer engine optimisation, or AEO, is a response to changes in how AI chatbots generate their answers. The earliest chatbots, released several years ago, were trained on huge amounts of information that was already publ...