Original · Unique Research · 2026-04-07
Editor's note: This historical edition retains the published interview article in full, including its reported narrative, emphatic language, repeated principles, and all five selected Q&A pairs. “High entropy,” “low entropy,” and the title's claim about winning are the source's explanatory framing, not a quantified scientific measure or a performance guarantee. The claim that brand confusion causes incorrect AI descriptions is Riven's view as reported; it does not establish that every hallucination is a brand's fault. The unnamed client's improvements have no supplied baseline, percentages, test design, or independent verification. The 12-month outlook, first-five-seconds emphasis and possible 3–5-fold individual output are historical views or estimates, not measured universal results. OpenClaw/ChatGPT purchasing scenarios are illustrative and do not confirm current feature availability or authorize any transaction. Yidian Tianxia (Cyberklick) and Riven Gao's role are reproduced as identified by the source, not expanded into an independently verified corporate relationship. Compliance and permissions statements are the interviewee's principles, not legal conclusions. The separate same-day GEO panel shares themes but has a different article body; final duplication review remains open. The seven source images and final semantic/asset checks must still be completed before approval.
Extraordinary Awards · Guest Interview
Have You Searched for Your Own Company or Product in ChatGPT?
AI Will Not Automatically Understand You Correctly. It Will Faithfully Amplify Your Confusion.
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In the AI world, a brand naturally exists in a state of “high entropy.”
If you have tried searching, you have probably encountered one of two situations: either AI makes things up and confuses you with a competitor, or it cites information from three years ago that is already outdated.
You might consider this an AI “hallucination.” But Riven Gao, Head of DTC Brand Technology at Yidian Tianxia (Cyberklick), sees it differently: it is not AI's fault, but yours.
“In the AI world, a brand naturally exists in a state of ‘high entropy.’” In our in-depth interview, Riven pinpointed what he sees as the biggest pain point for brands expanding across borders.
ChatGPT describes you differently from Perplexity, while different pages contradict one another. A brand's image in AI is essentially the sum of all the Context in which it has been cited. When Context is confused, the brand image is confused. When Context is out of control, business in the AI era will be out of control, too.
So in the harsh transition from the traffic dividend to the AI dividend, success no longer depends on publishing a few more advertorials. It depends on whether you can become a “low-entropy,” structured entity that machines can call upon.
GEO Is Fundamentally About Reducing Entropy
Many people misunderstand GEO—Generative Engine Optimization—thinking it simply means using generative AI to mass-produce articles and repackage them around keywords.
Riven finds that approach laughable. “For me, the journey from prompt engineering to commercial conversion has never been about getting AI to generate a few more articles. It is about giving a brand, for the first time, a low-entropy, controllable, reusable system of expression.”
He described a typical client case: a DTC brand expanding overseas whose team initially pursued more pages indiscriminately. When Riven's team came in, their first step was not writing content, but “reconstructing Context.”
They reorganized the brand's selling points, user questions, and core FAQ, then mapped those to the Shopify site's structure, technical SEO, and conversion paths.
Does that sound like a pile of dull technical terms? In plain language, they were teaching machines how to understand the brand correctly.
Only when “how the brand should be understood by machines” is clearly defined can it become a structure that search engines and AI systems can read continuously. After this combined entropy-reduction effort, the results were clear: the site handled organic-search traffic more consistently, users needed less effort to understand it, and onsite conversion efficiency improved noticeably.
Others teach you how to trick AI. Riven teaches you how to make AI recognize you accurately, trust you, and cite you. That is an entirely different dimension.
Traffic Is No Longer the Hard Part. What Happens After Arrival Is the Deadly Funnel.
Another illusion in the AI era is that traffic has become cheap.
Use AI to generate multilingual assets in bulk and automate ad placement, and incoming traffic may look lively. But one look at the conversion funnel can be alarming.
“Across the entire journey, the point where users are most likely to drop off is often not whether they click, but whether they understand what they encounter and are properly guided after reaching the site.” Riven emphasized that many brands do not lack entry points. What they lack is the ability to communicate clearly and build trust within the first 5 seconds after a user clicks through.
What role does AI actually play in this process?
Riven's observation is counterintuitive: AI makes content generation faster, but without governance, that only means “confusion happens faster.”
AI has replaced highly repetitive work such as initial content drafts and multilingual expansion. At the same time, it has created increasingly demanding work in brand-context governance, fact-checking, and structural governance. Without a unified knowledge base as a baseline, AI localization can easily become a situation where “the language sounds more local, but the brand sounds less like itself.”
So the faster rules change and the higher AI output becomes, the less acceptable it is to treat AI as a way to escape responsibility. “Technology improves efficiency; humans make the final judgment,” Riven stressed. “We must not lose that boundary.”
In 2026, Brands Must Set a Second Flywheel in Motion
But limiting your perspective to website building and traffic acquisition underestimates how AI is reshaping commerce.
In the interview, Riven offered an important insight: over the next 12 months, cross-border DTC brands will operate two “growth flywheels” at the same time.
The first is the classic flywheel: site experience + traffic from advertising/search + onsite conversion-rate optimization. This remains the foundation.
The second is the new flywheel: standardized product data + enabling purchases in AI contexts + conversion within the conversation.
This is Agentic Commerce, which Riven is actively exploring.
In the past, all marketing activity pointed toward one endpoint: “Bring users to my official website to buy.” In the Agentic Commerce era, a shopping journey might instead look like this: an AI agent, such as OpenClaw or ChatGPT, compares prices and researches across the internet, then presents product links directly in the conversation or even initiates a purchase.
In this new flywheel, your standalone website is no longer the only place where a sale happens. The AI agent becomes a super-powered shopping assistant that brings in orders.
What does this require of brands?
“Agentic Commerce is not an isolated new concept. It is the natural result of AI moving from ‘assisting content production’ to ‘participating in commercial conversion,’” Riven said. When an Agent participates in purchase decisions, a few PR advertorials are no longer enough. You need callable product-data interfaces, a clear brand-knowledge structure, and reliable transaction authorization.
In other words, if your product information is unstructured and machines cannot read it, you are invisible on the shelves of next-generation e-commerce.
“Embrace Openness and Deepen the Foundation”
Of course, handing core data interfaces to the many AI Agent tools appearing seemingly overnight carries enormous risk.
When discussing open Agent frameworks such as the recently popular OpenClaw, Riven showed the caution expected of a technology leader. His main concern is not how smart the Agent is, but how clear its permission boundaries are.
“Once it connects to accounts on multiple platforms, site administration systems, CRM… the issue is no longer just efficiency. It is account security, data isolation, and compliance.” For advanced, established brands, a shift toward in-house Agent workflows is an inevitable trend. But it requires providers and brands to build a system-level governance architecture together, rather than blindly piling on features.
Faced with a highly uncertain future, Riven's answer is: “Embrace openness at the underlying level, and deepen your core capabilities.” Traffic entry points and Agent tools can change however they will, but brand-knowledge engineering and the ability to build a Shopify growth foundation are competitive defenses that no technology can take away.
At the end of the interview, when discussing expectations for the future, Riven turned to the prospects of individuals.
“AI is continually amplifying the value of ‘super individuals.’” He believes strongly self-driven people who can quickly master new workflows may, with AI, produce 3 to 5 times as much as traditional roles.
Competition in the AI era is not just about whose code runs faster or whose budget is bigger. Fundamentally, it is about who can shed high-entropy confusion more quickly and become the clearest, sharpest piece of the machine world's puzzle.
Selected Interview Q&A
Q: At what stage of a brand's development does Yidian Tianxia Cyberklick's DTC Brand Technology department address its pain points?
Riven Gao: The brands we typically serve already have a product foundation and recognize the importance of a standalone site. But they have not yet closed the loop between the site, content, search visibility, and conversion paths. They can keep operating in a rough-and-ready way, but it is not stable. They need a team that understands Shopify, AI, SEO/GEO, and CRO to combine fragmented problems into a system that can be optimized sustainably, building genuine technical assets and search assets.
Q: What is the hardest core capability to replicate in visibility marketing?
Riven Gao: It is not a single algorithm or content capability. It is the ability to engineer brand knowledge, site structure, and search visibility into an integrated system. How do you ensure that a brand is consistently understood as the same brand across different markets and AI engines? That is a systems-engineering problem. Managing brand Context as a low-entropy system that can be optimized continually—that is what it means for a brand to hold the authority to define how it is understood.
Q: DTC brands expanding overseas often pursue short-term ROAS. How do you view the tension between that and long-term brand assets?
Riven Gao: Short-term ROAS addresses efficiency at a particular stage, while brand visibility determines future efficiency. If you pursue only short-term returns without building site and search assets, growth costs will inevitably rise. The genuinely healthy approach is to pursue short-term results and long-term asset development together.
Q: AI prompt engineering can generate traffic and creative assets at scale. With overseas platform policies changing so quickly, how can brands avoid violations?
Riven Gao: The faster the rules change, the less acceptable it is to use AI as an excuse to avoid responsibility. Awareness of the rules must be built into the workflow from the start. Our principle is that technology improves efficiency and humans make the final judgment. AI-generated assets are not automatically compliant; advertisers remain responsible for truthfulness and conformity with platform policies.
Q: If a brand wants to use an Agent such as OpenClaw for visibility marketing, where should it start? What must never be handed over to a machine?
Riven Gao: The first processes to become Agent-based will be clearly defined, repetitive work such as data organization, basic analysis, and initial content structuring. The things least suited to delegation to an Agent are brand positioning and judgments about key narratives. What determines a brand's long-term value is never automatic generation alone, but your capacity for judgment.