6 Marketing Strategies to Bring Your Brand Visibility into the Age of AI
Brand visibility today means appearing not only in search rankings, but inside AI-generated answers, summaries, citations, and conversational responses across platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and search overviews.
Before your eyes glaze over, we know it’s a lot to focus on. And for brands lacking robust internal content teams, it may not be a focus at all. But if you’re responsible for brand visibility, demand generation, or content strategy, your search playbook just changed, and you can’t afford to take a backseat.
This post lays out the core tenets of an AI-friendly marketing plan so you can make incremental but important improvements to increase your visibility.
People Use LLMs as Their Sole Source of Information
Brand visibility is no longer achievable solely through traditional SEO tactics, which, as a reminder, typically follows this cadence:
- Capturing a top-10 SERP ranking through a combination of keywords, technical SEO, backlink strategies, and topic authority
- Moving your audience through the funnel with strategic content and CTAs
- Turning traffic to your site into conversions
Today, search behavior and AI are changing how information is found online, representing the biggest shift in how search results are delivered since the 1990s.
Language learning models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Gemini are upending that playbook, and user behavior has followed suit.
An Adobe survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers, marketers, and small business owners who use ChatGPT found that the AI tool has rapidly become a primary or sole source for information; 77% use ChatGPT as a search engine, with 24% turning to it first, and 3 in 10 respondents said they trust it more than other search engines.
Crucially, 36% of those surveyed said they discovered a new brand or product through ChatGPT, which gets to the purpose of this article:
What does brand visibility look like in the age of AI, and how can you get – and keep – eyeballs on your brand?
Conventional to Conversational: The Search Behavior Evolution
Conversational search really took off with virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, which serve up answers and information through a friendly – and bizarrely human – exchange.
LLMs further cemented the human-ness of it all by moving us away from conventional search indexing: crawling, analyzing, and storing content in a structured database to be accessed by keywords. These contextual SERPs provide direct answers and allow for iterative refinement – much like a person-to-person dialog.
Now, brand-driven results have been replaced by data-driven results from web crawls, forums, social media, knowledge bases, digital books, and more, serving up “zero click” answers that function exactly the way they sound: informative enough that users don’t click for more.
If an AI overview is shown on a SERP, website links get pushed below, and brands worried about the impact on their website traffic have good reason to be.
A Seer Interactive study conducted between June 2024 and September 2025 proved a correlation between declines in click-through-rates and the presence of AI overviews – and alarmingly, these declines occurred whether search results were organic or paid, and were slightly higher for paid search, even when the brand was cited in the AI overview:
- In organic searches, when AIOs were present, but the brand wasn’t cited, CTR declined 65%
- In paid searches, when AIOs were present, but the brand wasn’t cited, CTR declined 78%
- In organic searches, when AIOs were present and the brand was cited, CTR declined 49%
- In paid searches, when AIOs were present, and the brand was cited, CTR declined 53%
While it’s clear AI overviews have influence over CTR, one of the most compelling takeaways from this study was the finding that even when no AIO was present on the SERP, click-through rates still declined 46% for organic search and 20% for paid.
The study captures the deeper meaning here that matters most for brand visibility:
“This suggests broader forces are at work beyond just AI Overviews. Users are likely seeking answers in other places before Google, like ChatGPT, Perplexity, social platforms, or going directly to trusted brands. Even when AIOs don’t dominate the SERP, traditional organic results are struggling to maintain click-through rates for informational or educational queries.”
The implication is that AI overviews are impacting CTR on all fronts, and brands that are still relying solely on traditional tactics for visibility need a different approach – one that is optimized for conversational search patterns and follows a machine-parsable content structure to increase discoverability and citations.
Why? Because it is now also AI interfaces, not just search engines, that are pulling users into the buyer journey.
If your traffic patterns are shifting unexpectedly, visibility diagnostics can reveal whether AI summaries are replacing your clicks. Contact us today to start a conversation about your brand’s content discoverability.
6 Strategies to Achieve Brand Visibility in the AI Landscape
As much as things are changing, the importance of strengthening your brand across channels, building trust, and creating a memorable brand experience remains as important as ever.
Here are 6 strategies to help gain and maintain brand visibility in an AI-driven landscape:
1. Prioritize and Evolve Your SEO Strategy
You may have noticed we haven’t specifically referenced generative search optimization (GEO) or answer engine optimization (AEO) in this article. A prevailing sentiment among marketers is that it’s all SEO – just repackaged with fancy new acronyms to address AI-friendly strategies.
There’s no argument that content optimizations look a bit different. SEO has evolved, and getting your brand cited in AI overviews and summaries requires an evolution to your content strategy.
Brands need to place a higher priority on citable, high-quality content that is valuable and educational over keyword-driven, high-quantity content that regurgitates information already available online.
Audiences looking for deeper context will click through to read unique thought leadership content with expert insights, independent research, and proprietary data.
Dive Deeper: SEO Looks Different Now
2. Drive Brand Awareness Through Offline Advertising
As the Seer Interactive survey suggests, paid search isn’t performing the way it used to.
In a recent Yoast webinar, Principal SEO Carolyn Shelby advised brands to diversify their revenue sources because financing entirely through ad revenue is becoming inaccessible to smaller brands.
Shelby reminded listeners that one of the best ways to get found online and drive traffic to your site is by getting users to type your brand’s name into their search. This is a somewhat obvious tip, but one many brands may not be keeping top-of-mind.
If your brand relies on advertising to drive income, it’s time to consider offline options to showcase your brand, make an impression, and drive awareness in places where you’re more likely to be seen, remembered, and searched.
3. Leverage Social Media and Video to Maintain Brand Visibility
A widespread concern among brand marketers is whether content even matters anymore if organic SEO is becoming increasingly ineffective at driving clicks and revenue.
In the same Yoast webinar, Shelby noted that Gemini (which is owned by Alphabet, which is owned by YouTube) actively includes videos in its responses even if they’re not totally related, presenting an opportunity for brands to get seen with video content related to a search. And according to Search Engine Journal’s March 2026 AI overview analysis, YouTube is a top citation source for AIOs, even when it did not rank in Google’s top 100 for the same keyword.
Content needs to have citation eligibility to get found by AI models, so creating diverse content formats only works if it is well-researched and credible. That said, nearly every brand has the ability to create video content and increase its visibility based on how people are being served up information by LLMs.
4. Build Trust Through the Press
AI uses news outlets and publications to validate brand credibility, and if your brand appears in these third-party sources, it is more likely to appear in AI overviews and summaries.
While PR outreach has long been part of building a strong backlink strategy, it works the same way for AI search.
- Select news outlets and publications that align with your brand and message to ensure relevance and visibility.
- Reach out with contextual content highlighting your brand in meaningful and memorable ways.
- Integrate thought leadership elements, such as expert quotes, interviews, or “hot takes”.
- Amplify your brand’s publication in any third-party sources on your own social channels and website.
5. Review and Update Content to Prevent AI Hallucinations
Showing up in an AI overview or summary is great, but if the information shown isn’t accurate, it reflects poorly on your brand.
AI does have a sneaky little habit of hallucinating information – but it’s not the one to blame. MIT Sloane explains that generative AI models are designed to predict the next word or sequence based on observed patterns – not verify its truth. Even if the content sounds reasonable, it could be wrong.
If your content contains outdated, misleading, or inaccurate information, you are presenting that information to the world and creating a weak point in your brand reputation.
Make sure your brand can stand behind and be accountable for every piece of content you’re publishing.
Dive Deeper: If You’re Producing AI Slop, Your Brand is Suffering
6. Add the Right Structured Data Schema for Better AI Discoverability
AI discoverability is exactly what it sounds like: how “findable” your content is by AI models. There is some ongoing disagreement about whether schema really increases visibility for LLMs, to which I have two responses:
- When implemented correctly, schema improves AI discoverability by:
- improving the structured data context AI tools use to discover, understand, parse, and cite content
- increasing the likelihood you’ll show up in conversational search results
- What’s the worst that could happen?
While your CMS should handle the core schema types for basic content like blogs, authors, and breadcrumbs, other types of content for products, services, recipes, or local business listings need a specific schema to move the visibility needle.
Medium author Vicky Larson analyzed 73 websites across different industries and found that those with properly-implemented structured data schema for AI search were cited in AI responses more than 3 times as often as those without.
With AI overviews triggered for nearly half of all tracked queries, schema can certainly help your brand get cited. In fact, a study conducted in October 2025 confirmed that major LLMs process schema markup when processing content.
Want help understanding how to weave AI into your marketing strategy without losing the authenticity that makes your brand unique? Get in touch with the Fishnet team today to map out your next steps.
Traditional SEO Still Matters
I would be remiss not to hammer home that keyword-driven SEO is still responsible for nearly half of all organic search results, so by no means should anyone be replacing traditional SEO practices with solely AI-focused tactics.
A few major reasons why:
- Not all searches trigger an AI overview, so keywords are still critical for search engines to understand the best results to show.
- AI overviews often cite content that isn’t present on the first SERP results page; in fact, only 17% of sources cited in the AIO are ranked in Google’s top 10. So if users scroll past the overview, organic search is still delivering the most relevant results.
- Content quality, site health, and topic authority remain the fundamental elements that push content to the surface and give your brand visibility online.
It is now AI interfaces, not just search engines, that are pulling users into the buyer journey.
Brand Visibility Comes Down to Brand Strength
AI will not just hand your brand a citation as a reward for creating content. Getting found online requires a rethinking of your brand’s messaging, content strategy, and SEO strategy to deliver:
- Conversational, answer-first content with structural clarity
- Contextual relationships between ideas
- Topic authority demonstrating experience, expertise, and trustworthiness
- FAQs and other direct-answer content that can be quickly cited
At the core of your content strategy remains your audience.
A still-critical component of brand messaging to gain visibility in this wild search landscape is understanding what your audience is searching for and how to deliver that information in an authentic, novel way that will stand out to AI and entice a click.
Dive Deeper: The Slow Deaths of Authenticity and Novelty
And don’t forget – tracking beyond clicks is paramount to understanding how your brand is performing in search. You need to know how often your brand is cited in AI summaries, and if LLMs like ChatGPT are using your content for answers to queries.
Start thinking beyond the search engine, and your content strategy will follow.
Get a deeper look at how AI search is impacting your brand’s content, and what you can do to improve traffic and credibility. Get in touch with the Fishnet team today to map out your next steps.
