Picture a voter in a swing district, relaxing after dinner. They aren’t flipping on cable news or browsing a campaign website. Instead, they open ChatGPT and ask, “What does [candidate name] actually stand for?”
A few seconds later, they’ve got an answer. Where did it come from? How accurate is it? Does it paint the candidate in a fair light? Those questions aren’t up to chance anymore. The answer depends on who’s shaping the information these AI systems use.
This year’s midterms are set to be the first where AI plays a decisive role in how voters form opinions. It’s not background noise. For millions of Americans, it’s the first place they’ll go for answers, long before they even think about casting a ballot. Campaigns that get this will have an edge money can’t buy. The rest? They’ll be stuck with whatever story AI decides to tell about them.
1. How Are Voters Actually Using AI to Research Candidates?
Not long ago, learning about a candidate meant watching TV ads, flipping through mailers, maybe catching a debate, or chatting with a neighbor. It was a slow process, pieced together from whatever paid media happened to land in your lap.
Now the pace is quicker, and campaigns have far less control. Voters are asking AI chatbots direct questions like, “What’s [candidate]’s stance on immigration?” “Has [candidate] kept their promises?” or “Is [candidate] corrupt?” These aren’t just searches for a website. They’re full conversations. The AI responds in clear sentences, pulling from whatever information exists online about that candidate.
The numbers don’t lie. ChatGPT handles more than 2 billion questions every day and holds around 70 percent of the AI search market. Google’s AI Overviews now show up in 55% of all searches. Voters don’t have to visit campaign websites anymore. They get a neatly packaged answer before they even think about clicking a link.
This isn’t just a minor change in how voters learn about politics. It’s a complete shift in how political stories take shape, and most campaigns haven’t started to build a strategy for it.
2. Can AI Actually Change How People Vote?
The answer is surprisingly clear, and the evidence is still hot off the press.
David Rand, a professor at Cornell, worked with Gordon Pennycook and a team of researchers from several universities for a study published in Nature in December 2025. They enlisted over 2,300 Americans, just a couple of months before the 2024 presidential election, and had each person chat with an AI chatbot designed to favor either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.
The results? Not what anyone expected.
When Trump supporters talked to the Harris-friendly AI, they edged 3.9 points closer to Harris on a 100-point scale. That’s about four times as much persuasion as political ads managed in 2016 or 2020. The team ran the same experiment during the 2025 Canadian and Polish elections, and the shifts were even bigger there.
The persuasion didn’t come from emotion or rhetoric. It came from the AI, citing facts and evidence in a calm, conversational way. The kind of conversation that feels like a trusted advisor rather than a campaign flyer.
One thing stands out, and it’s not reassuring. The AI models that did the most convincing were also the least accurate. The chatbots that swayed people the most were the ones slipping up on facts. They were confident, smooth, and sometimes completely off-base. That’s the information environment your voters are wandering through right now.
3. What Happens When AI Gets Your Candidate Wrong?
AI doesn’t have opinions, but it does have sources. If the information out there about your candidate is thin, out of date, inaccurate, or mostly written by your opponents, that’s exactly what the AI will pull together and share with voters.
Picture how that plays out. A voter types a question about a local congressional candidate into ChatGPT. If that candidate has no solid online presence, no clear policy pages, and no recent credible coverage, the AI fills in the blanks with whatever it can dig up. Maybe it’s a bad news story from two years ago, a misquote that made the rounds on social media, or an opponent’s attack ad that got picked up by a few blogs.
Back in October 2025, Nathan Sanders and Bruce Schneier at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center pointed out that the way campaigns use AI in 2026 will look very different. The teams that understand the technology are about to get a real edge, while those who treat it as a sideshow are going to fall behind.
The candidates who let AI define them are the ones who never took control of their own narrative. The ones who win are the ones who did.
4. What Is AEO and Why Does It Matter More Than Traditional Campaign SEO?
Most campaigns still put money into SEO, trying to make their website show up first on Google for their candidate’s name and key issues. That’s important, but it’s only part of the story now.
Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO, is about shaping a candidate’s digital presence so AI systems can find, understand, and share their positions with voters. It’s not just about landing high on a search results page. It’s about being the source AI turns to when someone asks a direct question about who you are and what you stand for.
The opportunity here is huge. Gartner predicts traditional search volume will drop by a quarter in 2026 as people switch to AI chatbots and virtual agents. AI-driven web sessions shot up 527 percent year-over-year through the middle of 2025. And visitors who show up thanks to AI citations are 4.4 times more likely to engage or take action than those who came through regular organic search.
For campaigns, “conversion” means winning a vote. At Tower 25, our AEO services are how you make sure the answer AI gives about your candidate is accurate, authoritative, and actually comes from you.
5. What Does AEO Actually Look Like for a Political Campaign?
AEO isn’t just technical jargon. It’s a set of practical steps that build on the digital foundation campaigns already need.
- Structured policy content. AI tools look for clear, direct answers to specific questions. If your campaign website is full of vague talking points, it’s not going to show up in AI answers. But if you have pages that spell out where your candidate stands on issues like healthcare, answering the question head-on, you’re in much better shape. Every policy position should be written to address exactly what a voter might ask an AI.
- Authoritative third-party coverage. AI doesn’t rely only on your own website. It pulls from credible sources across the internet. Getting coverage in respected outlets, endorsements from trusted organizations, and solid Wikipedia entries all feed the AI with accurate, positive information about your candidate. Your site is just one piece. What fifty other reputable sources say carries even more weight.
- Consistent entity signals. AI engines build a picture of a candidate by looking at how they’re described across every platform, including your website, social media, news stories, and directories. Inconsistencies or missing details make that picture weaker. When your message is tight and matches everywhere, it makes your campaign much stronger in the eyes of AI.
- Answer-first content formats. Put clear, direct answers right at the top of your pages. Use FAQs that match the questions voters are actually asking. Add structured data markup that helps AI systems pull and credit information quickly. These aren’t just SEO tricks. They’re the building blocks that turn your content into something AI can actually use.
- Review and reputation signals. What your community says about you, testimonials, local news, and the general vibe, matter for your authority in the eyes of AI. These signals are part of AEO, not separate from it.
At Tower 25, our AEO and GEO services are all about making sure the answer AI gives about your candidate is the one you’d give yourself. We start with a thorough audit of what AI is saying right now, then move to replacing gaps or mistakes with content that’s clear, authoritative, and easy for AI to find and cite.
6. How Big Is the AI Search Audience That Campaigns Are Missing?
We’ve already passed the point where this is just an “emerging trend.” Using AI for search is mainstream now.
ChatGPT’s weekly active users jumped from 300 million in December 2024 to 800 million by October 2025. That’s a 2.6 times increase in less than a year, according to OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
McKinsey reports that 44 percent of people using AI-powered search now see it as their main source of information, while only 31 percent still turn first to traditional search.
The R Street Institute, in a January 2026 analysis of AI’s role in the upcoming midterms, pointed out that 2026 is shaping up to be the first election cycle where AI tools shift from the sidelines to the center of campaign strategy and voter research. The gap between campaigns that are ready for AI and those that aren’t is growing fast as election day gets closer.
In close races, that gap is the margin. A two-to-four point shift in voter sentiment is the difference between winning and conceding.