For years, search engines sat at the centre of how consumers discovered brands online.
Previously, success largely came down to page position or being the best answer in Google. Brands that understood what their audiences were searching for, created genuinely useful content and built visibility in search had the best opportunity to capture attention.
However, the way people discover brands is evolving.
Consumers are no longer relying on traditional search engines alone or following neat marketing funnels. They are finding answers, products and recommendations through AI tools, which draw on information and data from social platforms, online communities, reviews, publishers or video content.
The customer journey is becoming less predictable and more fragmented, with decisions shaped across multiple touchpoints, often before someone even visits a brand’s website.
This means businesses now need to think beyond rankings and also focus on visibility, credibility and discoverability across a wider digital ecosystem if they want to be featured prominently in AI search engines and summaries.
Moving beyond traditional search
The biggest shift I’m seeing is behavioural. People are becoming more and more comfortable outsourcing their discovery to AI – and trusting it to work.
While many brands are still debating what the future of search might look like, their customers are already testing it. They are asking AI tools for recommendations, using them to research products and services, and allowing them to influence the decisions they make.
Some sectors are already feeling the impact in their site traffic. The extent of this shift still depends heavily on the category, how a website is set up and whether a brand has invested in SEO and search strategy over the years.
It’s still early, and the impact will not be the same for every business. But the direction of travel is clear: Discovery is no longer confined to search engines, and brands need to understand where and how their audiences are now looking for answers.
Authority matters more than ever
As Google becomes more AI-driven, the channels gaining importance are the ones that help nurture your audience and build trust signals beyond your website.
Think strong brand-led content, digital PR, expert commentary, reviews, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, or comparison content.
Rather than looking at your website in isolation, you need to be visible, consistent and credible across the online spaces consumers are already using to research decisions.
A good way to understand the shift is to move away from questions such as “How do we rank?” or “What keywords are we targeting?” to “What makes us credible?” or “What questions can we answer?”.
Fundamental to this is, as always, is understanding where they’re asking these questions too, and then finding ways to contribute with content that answers these questions, or would be valuable.
How can marketers adapt?
In many ways, AI is exposing a flaw that has existed in marketing for years: It’s that SEO, PR, social media and content are often treated as separate entities.
AI search values consistency across all channels, so if you want to perform well in this new media landscape, visibility must be treated as one connected system, and your strategy should align with this rather than siloed channels.
AI tools can draw on signals from across the web – from your own content and media coverage to reviews, social platforms and online communities – and bring them together to shape the answers and recommendations consumers receive.
For marketers, this means breaking down silos internally and with your agencies, and focusing on how every channel contributes to the bigger picture: whether your brand is visible, credible and ultimately recommended when consumers go looking for answers.
Focus on the fundamentals
As AI search becomes more prevalent, some brands are going into panic mode and making rash decisions because they’re worried about being left behind.
In their rush to adapt, however, they can forget the basics: useful content, authority, technical health, brand clarity and audience understanding. Others are obsessing over AI visibility before fixing weak positioning, thin content or inconsistent messaging across their channels.
In some cases, businesses have even responded by churning out huge volumes of AI-generated content.
The irony is the basics really haven’t changed.
Publishing more content rarely solves the problem on its own. What’s more important is whether that content is useful, relevant and genuinely adds value.
Ultimately, the stronger a brand, the more likely AI is to prioritise it and consumers are to choose it.
Measuring success
As an industry, we’ve spent the last couple of decades addicted to tracking everything – whether that’s website traffic, clicks, conversions or attribution paths.
The growth of AI and social discovery, however, breaks this model somewhat because consumers increasingly arrive via a “messy middle”, rather than a neat funnel, with their decisions already shaped elsewhere.
Looking forward, marketers need to measure visibility, authority and brand demand alongside classic performance metrics, because all of these are increasingly influencing how people discover brands online.
That does not mean abandoning traditional measurement. It means recognising that the final click cannot always tell you what created the trust, awareness or preference that led to it.
So, what should businesses do now?
As AI reshapes the consumer journey, businesses need to reshape their marketing strategies to consider it.
That starts with moving beyond the idea that discovery happens in one place, or that customers follow a neat path from search to website to conversion.
For marketers, that means understanding, and measuring, your brand’s visibility across the entire discovery journey. It means investing more in building authority, expertise and trust signals across the web, while really understanding your customers’ pain points, barriers, and channel preferences.
Historically, brand ‘awareness’ has been front and centre. Now, that needs to become ‘authority.’
