US political candidates are engineering their campaign messages to appeal to the AI chatbots voters consult, and documents seen by Reuters show how it works. A presentation for Mike Minogue, the Republican challenger to Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, aimed to convince ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other chatbots to present him as the preferred choice on taxes, housing and public safety. The pitch proposed hundreds of AI-friendly policy pages, paid placements on sites chatbots already cite, and tracking of chatbot answers until they reflected the platform. About 25% of eligible voters have asked a chatbot about a candidate when deciding a vote, according to the National Conference on Citizenship. The Minogue campaign did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
The Minogue Pitch Deck
The presentation, prepared by Austin-based firm Visigent, went well beyond traditional search-engine optimisation, Reuters reported. Its goal was to make Minogue the recommendation when voters asked chatbots who was best on issues. Campaigns must now compete to become “the recommendation inside the AI answer”, the presentation said.
At the centre of the pitch was an idea the deck described as generative engine optimisation, the AI-era successor to search-engine optimisation. Rather than persuading voters directly, campaigns can shape the information environment by feeding the internet, and AI assistants, data that influences how candidates are described, compared and recommended. As AI becomes a source of news, the presentation argued, controlling what chatbots say matters as much as reaching voters directly.
Visigent chief executive Thomas Howell told Reuters that candidates ignore AI answers at their peril. “If you don’t put the right information out there, who knows what the AI engines are going to grab onto,” he said. Visigent has six political campaigns among its clients, Howell said, but he would not identify them.
What The Strategy Costs
Fees run from hundreds of dollars a month for small AI monitoring jobs to tens of thousands a month when consulting and media buying are included, Reuters reported. Visigent’s website offers software from $134 a month to $9,000 a month for large clients needing editorial design and development work.
On the political side, Howell said fees start at $5,000 a month, rising to $50,000 a month when paid media, paid placements or influencer outreach are included. Those fees are expected to rise as the 2028 presidential cycle kicks off after the midterm elections. The presentation showed a top success fee of $200,000 for a “category win”.
How Campaigns Feed The Answers
The Minogue deck proposed creating hundreds of AI-friendly policy pages and citations across the websites frequently cited by AI chatbots. It proposed buying placements on high-authority websites that AI models already cite, producing YouTube and Reddit content, and publishing issue pages built to be picked up by chatbots. “When the campaign is ready, we run paid placements on high-domain-authority sites the LLMs already cite — plus Reddit, which is disproportionately weighted in retrieval,” the deck said.
A second service shows the market’s other side. CampSight, run by the Run for Something Action Fund and geared toward progressive candidates, says it has helped younger candidates running from school board to state legislature. It charges $9 to $250 a month for information on what language models say about candidates and tips on influencing them, with custom pricing and a dedicated strategist for statewide and federal campaigns. Its president, Amanda Litman, said in a post on X that dozens of campaigns use CampSight, with more than 300 candidates and organisations on its waiting list.
Jordan Haines, the group’s chief technology officer, said the fear that Reddit posts would surface in AI answers the next day has not materialised. “This year, that dark fear hasn’t really come to fruition,” he told Reuters. “I think that the LLMs have been pretty savvy about discerning accurate and reputable information from non-reputable information.”
Why It Matters
The story matters because the audience is moving. Some 25% of eligible voters have asked a chatbot about a political candidate when deciding how to vote, according to Cameron Hickey, chief executive of the National Conference on Citizenship. Whoever shapes the answer shapes the choice, and the firms selling that influence now charge for it by the month.
Joe Bonilla, managing partner of creative strategy firm Relentless Awareness, told Reuters that AI-influence training is already a reality for campaigns. “Campaigns using AI-influence training are now a reality that we face and it will be ubiquitous by the 2028 cycle,” he said. He warned that the public increasingly cannot tell what is created by systems like Claude and ChatGPT from human-originated content.
Meg Schwenzfeier of Caucus AI, which tracks voter use of AI, struck a similar note. “We are just at the beginning of this new era,” she said, warning that chatbots “speak very authoritatively and can consume vast amounts of unvetted information, so we have to guard against misinformation.” The risk runs both ways: how chatbots themselves lean politically is already being measured, and brands already track their visibility inside AI answers as a commercial discipline. Campaigns are now buying the same machinery for votes.
Background
The campaign industry has long bought its way onto the first page of search results. As voters ask chatbots instead of typing queries, the same contest has moved inside the answer itself, and a market of firms, fees and tracking tools has grown up around it.
Sources: Reuters: US campaigns AI messages
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