Every day, people are increasingly asking AI questions about brands…
Which product is best for me? Which company should I trust? What should I buy? Which holiday suits my family? How does one brand compare with another?
The difference is that, unlike traditional search, brands can’t necessarily see those conversations happening. Plus, the answer really matters, because when somebody asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or another AI platform for advice, the response could determine whether your brand makes the shortlist, gets ignored entirely, or loses the sale to a competitor.
In our recent webinar, ‘The AI Visibility Challenge: What Brands Need to Know’, our very own Amy Chadwick and Alia Khan, hosted by Steve Henry, explored what the rise of AI search means for brands and, importantly, what marketers should actually be doing about it.
Here are five of the biggest takeaways:
- We’re moving from ranking pages to AI choosing brands for us
For years, search has largely been a battle for position and now, AI changes that dynamic.
Instead of simply giving somebody ten blue links and leaving them to make the decision, AI can search, interpret and synthesise huge amounts of information before presenting an answer.
That means the question for marketers is no longer simply:
‘Where do we rank?’
It’s increasingly:
‘Are we part of the answer?’
There are three levels to think about.
A mention means your brand appears in the conversation.
A citation means information associated with your brand, or a source discussing it, is being used to support the answer.
A recommendation goes further, the AI actively suggests your brand as a suitable option for that person’s need.
To be recommended, it isn’t enough for an AI platform to know that your brand exists. It needs enough information to understand who you’re right for, how you’re different and what evidence supports the claims you’re making.
The new battleground isn’t only position… it’s presence.
- AI visibility is bigger than your website
One of the most important shifts for brands is understanding where AI gets its information. Your own website matters enormously, of course, but it isn’t the whole story.
Imagine somebody asks Gemini about the best television for a particular need. Your brand may appear in the answer, but the sources supporting that recommendation could be a retailer such as Argos, a comparison website, an independent review or another third-party source altogether.
AI is assembling a picture of your brand from an ecosystem of information.
That can include:
- Your website
- Retailer and distributor listings
- Reviews
- Press and editorial coverage
- Comparison websites
- Community discussions
- Customer experiences
- Other authoritative third-party sources
Which creates a new challenge for marketers. Is your product described consistently everywhere? Are the specifications correct across retailers? Do independent sources reinforce what you’re saying about yourself? Does the wider internet tell broadly the same story about your brand that you do?
Consistency gives AI greater confidence in understanding what something is, who it is for and whether the claims surrounding it can be trusted.
This is why AI visibility isn’t simply an SEO project, it connects SEO, brand strategy, digital PR, ecommerce, customer experience and reputation management.
In simple terms, your website tells AI what you say about yourself and the rest of the internet helps it decide whether to believe you.
- Don’t create content for AI, create better content for people.
The arrival of generative search has inevitably created another rush to find the latest optimisation trick. Do brands suddenly need hundreds of new pages designed around individual AI prompts? Should every article be rewritten for ChatGPT? Is there a new formula marketers need to follow?
…not really.
In fact, producing huge volumes of content simply to capture particular prompts can do more harm than good. The better opportunity is to make the information customers already need clearer, more useful and easier to extract. Think about the actual decision someone is trying to make.
If somebody searches:
‘Which Greek island is best for a family villa holiday?’
A genuinely useful page shouldn’t bury the answer beneath 800 words of generic destination copy, rather, it should help them make the decision.
Give the answer early, explain how the options differ, talk about travel times, facilities, suitability for younger children and any important trade-offs. Provide evidence and anticipate the next question they’re likely to ask.
In other words, create answerable content, useful content should make it obvious:
- What the answer is
- Who the product or service is right for
- How different options compare
- What the genuine advantages and disadvantages are
- What evidence supports the claims
- What the person should do next
This is good practice for AI, but more importantly, it’s good practice for customers.
The objective shouldn’t be to write for machines. It should be to make genuinely useful information easier for both people and machines to understand.
- Good GEO starts with good SEO and an even clearer brand
SEO isn’t dead, far from it!
Traditional search remains enormously important for most businesses, and protecting existing organic performance should continue to be a priority.
The rise of Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) adds another layer rather than replacing what came before. The technical foundations remain familiar; content needs to be accessible, crawlable, understandable and properly structured.
AI, however, does introduce another important question: why should your brand be considered for this particular need? That’s where brand strategy starts to matter even more, because AI needs clarity.
What do you want to be known for? Which customer problems are you genuinely good at solving? What distinguishes you from the alternatives? And, crucially, can you prove it?
Case studies, reviews, independent coverage, customer evidence and consistent third-party information all help build the credibility behind your positioning. There is little value trying to become visible for every possible conversation surrounding your category.
Brands need to identify the conversations that actually matter commercially as being recommended for something you barely sell, make little margin from or don’t particularly want to be famous for isn’t necessarily a success.
The starting point should therefore be strategy, not optimisation; what do we want to be known for, can we credibly prove it, and which AI conversations would genuinely matter to the business?
- Your existing search dashboard no longer tells the whole story
Perhaps the trickiest challenge for marketers is measurement. Historically, search reporting has focused heavily on things such as rankings, impressions, clicks, website traffic and conversions.
Those metrics do still matter, but AI creates interactions where somebody may discover, evaluate and even shortlist your brand without ever visiting your website.
If a customer asks an AI assistant for a recommendation and your brand appears prominently in the answer, that’s valuable visibility even if there isn’t an immediate click to measure.
Brands, therefore, need to broaden what they monitor alongside traditional SEO performance. We would advise that marketers should increasingly understand:
- Prompt visibility: Are we appearing when customers ask commercially important questions?
- Mentions and citations: How frequently is our brand appearing and which sources are being used?
- Platform visibility: Are we stronger on ChatGPT, Gemini, Google’s AI features or elsewhere?
- AI referrals: When AI platforms do send traffic, what does that audience do next?
- Source visibility: Which websites and publishers are repeatedly influencing answers in our category?
The important thing is not to chase a single universal ‘AI visibility score’, these platforms are changing quickly. Citation patterns change and sources that appear influential today may become less important tomorrow.
The more resilient strategy is to understand the questions customers are asking and build useful, credible information across multiple places.
So, where should brands start?
AI search can feel like another enormous marketing discipline to suddenly get to grips with but it doesn’t need to be.
Start with three questions:
- What do you want your brand to be known for? If you don’t define that clearly, AI will assemble its own interpretation from whatever information it can find.
- Can you prove it? Look beyond your advertising claims. What evidence, reviews, case studies, independent coverage and customer experiences support your position?
- Which conversations actually matter commercially? Identify the questions where appearing, or failing to appear, could genuinely influence growth.
From there, listen to what AI is already saying about your brand. Identify where you’re present, where competitors are winning and which sources are shaping the conversation. Correct obvious gaps and inconsistencies. Then build the content, reputation and authority required to earn greater visibility over time.
