There’s a question that keeps coming up in rooms full of smart people right now. It surfaces in board meetings, in strategy sessions, in panels hosted in old Dragon’s Den studios late on a Wednesday evening…
…if AI is deciding what people find, what they trust and what they buy – do brands still have any say in the matter?
It sounds alarming. But ask it a different way and the picture shifts entirely.
What if the signals AI uses to make those decisions are signals you’ve been generating all along? What if the machine isn’t in control of your brand – it’s just telling you, more honestly than anything has before, how your brand is actually perceived? That reframe changes everything.
Key takeaways:
- AI doesn’t control your brand – it reflects it. Visibility is an output of clarity, consistency and authority.
- You’re already training the machine. The question is whether you’re doing it deliberately.
- AI rewards what good brand building has always required: specificity, trust signals and consistency.
- What doesn’t change is human. AI is changing where consideration happens, not why people buy.
The illusion of lost control
For the past two years, the dominant narrative around AI and search has been one of loss. Lost traffic. Lost rankings. Lost control of the customer journey. And yes, some of that is real.
Organic clicks are declining (30% reduction since May 2024). AI Overviews are answering questions before anyone reaches your website (15-30% of searches). Zero-click searches are rising across every category.
Yet impressions are increasing (49%+ since the launch of AI Overviews).
Here’s what that narrative misses: brands never had as much control as they thought.
Google’s PageRank was always a measure of how the rest of the web talked about you, not how you described yourself. The best-performing brands in search weren’t always the ones who engineered their meta descriptions most carefully. They were the ones who had built genuine authority – through consistent content, earned coverage, real customer conversations and a clearly differentiated point of view.
As Karthik Tadinada, founder of AI security company Fortify, put it at our recent Future of Search panel: “Instead of just saying ‘we are this,’ you want to be answering the specific, important questions your audience is actually asking.” (paraphrased)
AI hasn’t changed that game. Just accelerated it.
Large language models (LLMs) don’t read your homepage and take your word for it. They synthesise what trusted sources, review platforms, communities and publications say about you. They look at how consistently your positioning holds across everything – your website, your press coverage, your customer reviews, your thought leadership, your social presence. They look for corroboration.
In other words: they reward what good brand building has always required.
You’re already training the machine
Every piece of content you publish, every review your customers leave, every mention you earn on a third-party platform, every expert quoted about your category – you’re contributing to the training data that shapes how AI systems understand and represent your brand.
It’s happening now, in real time.
Zebra Technologies understood this early. When they launched their website last year, they managed to gather a ton of basic information so that LLMs can be trained on it for their tech platforms, and in the end, that’s what opened things up. Organic traffic increased over the following six months, and their brand began appearing prominently in the AI conversations that mattered most to their buyers.
The machine didn’t do something to Zebra. Zebra got intentional about what it was feeding the machine.
What AI actually rewards
The question worth asking isn’t ‘how do I optimise for AI?’ It’s ‘what does AI look for?’ Because the answer is more human than most people expect.
Specificity over generality
Brands with a clear, well-defined point of view consistently outperform those with broad, generic positioning in AI-generated responses. If your brand could be any brand in your category, it will be treated as interchangeable.
Trust signals from third parties
LLMs don’t just crawl your website. They synthesise Trustpilot reviews, Reddit threads, industry publications, analyst reports, press coverage and community conversations. The brands that show up consistently in AI answers are the ones being talked about in the places AI is listening.
As Karthik explained: “We need leadership and resources. People are talking about your services or offerings on Reddit, on review platforms. All those factors help large language models, the crawlers, to train.”
Structural clarity
The way you organise information matters enormously. AI systems parse content for answers to specific questions. If your content is written in a way that clearly addresses the questions your buyers are asking, you are infinitely more useful to the machine than a competitor whose content is eloquently written but hard to extract signals from.
Consistency across surfaces
A brand that says one thing on its website, something subtly different in its thought leadership, and something different again in how its leadership shows up on LinkedIn is a brand that AI systems find difficult to characterise.
A real, authoritative human voice
Rebecca Rowntree, Creative and Get Sh*t Done founder made the point clearly at the panel: “AI is really good at showing you something cool that looks like it knows its stuff. Which is why I think trust – being able to tell if it’s a good choice or not – is so important.”
Rebeca highlighted the fact that great work often happens when you’re not afraid to speak up, question things and be genuinely human. Distinctiveness still matters. Probably more than it ever did.
The visibility question boards are now asking
Twelve months ago, the search conversation in most boardrooms was a technical one – delegated to the SEO team, measured by rankings and traffic. Today, it’s a visibility conversation and it’s landed squarely on the agenda of CEOs, CMOs and growth leads.
Rankings are a signal within a specific platform. Being recommended is an outcome of how your brand is positioned, structured, distributed and corroborated across the entire digital ecosystem. It can’t be fixed with a technical audit. It requires strategy.
The brands we’re seeing navigate this well are the ones who’ve connected these dots early. They’re asking AI systems directly – what do you understand about our brand? What are we known for? How do we compare to our competitors in your outputs? They’re using those answers not just to fix gaps, but to inform broader brand and content strategy.
What doesn’t change
Amid all of this, it’s worth pausing on what remains constant.
Human desire doesn’t change overnight. People still make decisions based on trust, familiarity, aspiration, community and emotion. They still want to feel that the brand they choose understands them. They still make high-value decisions with their own judgement, and delegate low-stakes decisions to whatever tool makes the process faster.
As Karthik put it: “Human will and human desire drive all of this. I don’t think that’s going away anytime soon. I think it’s important to understand what makes those things successful and used. People often feel a bit pressed for time, maybe even a bit overwhelmed. So, I don’t think that’s just going to disappear. And I believe the valuable outcome is a genuine idea that will immediately show its worth.”
What changes is where and how brands get considered. The research phase – the part where buyers form a shortlist, develop a point of view on a category and decide who the credible players are – is increasingly happening inside AI interfaces. If you’re not present and well-represented in that phase, you’re not on the shortlist.
You win by being genuinely, clearly, consistently worth recommending.
The practical starting point
If you’re a senior leader reading this and wondering where to start, here’s the honest answer: find out how AI systems currently describe your brand.
That gap between what you believe your brand stands for and how AI systems currently represent it is the gap your strategy needs to close.
Do you have something to confess?
Answer 10 quick questions to understand how visible your brand really is in AI-driven Search.
Sources:
- The Great Visibility Shift, Panel – StrategiQ and GTA – Future of Work
- Tracking AI driven journeys
- Our human-centric AI strategy
- One Year Into Google AI Overviews, BrightEdge Data Reveals Google Search Usage Increases by 49%
- The Great Decoupling Explained By A Googler