When AI Rewards Noise Over Skill: The Hidden Risk Facing Business Mentoring

AI finding noise not qualities

I’m a big fan of AI and its use as a tool, but I see an Industry problem.

Admittedly this is not limited to just Business Mentoring but rather is an issue for anyone seeking excellence in any sector. But just to look at it from a business mentoring perspective delivering tangible ROI from a suitably qualified or experienced mentor.

AI currently surfaces at a high level unqualified mentors and that is a structural risk

AI search today tends to return “SEO-visible providers”, not “professionally qualified mentors”.

And that means: Unqualified coaches can dominate AI search.

On a simple AI search for professional business mentors most of the mentors come from:

* commercial coaching franchises

* marketing-led coaching businesses

* generalist self-certified business coaches

* lifestyle coaches repackaged as business mentors

They appear because they have:

* high domain authority

* paid SEO teams

* extensive content engines

* strong interlinking within their franchise network

* schema markup across hundreds of templated pages

They do not appear because they are competent- They may well be and many are, that’s not the point, the generic search doesn’t care.

None of the top results are verified or qualified under a recognised mentoring standard or relevant background (ILM7, ABM Fellowship, EMCC, CMI, etc, decades of real commercial experience etc etc).

AI search engines currently have no competency filter.
They have no industry governing dataset to recognise skill, accreditation or experience.

So the market signal AI receives is:

“Who publishes the most pages and backlinks?”

Not:

“Who is actually qualified to mentor a business?”

This creates a very real professionalism problem for the industry and for the likes of Association of Business Mentors (ABM) to get their voice and standards/competencies heard- though they are certainly working hard to correct this.

Will a similar search in your own industry return the same issue?