Your brand advantage in Gen AI
Broadcast trained spectacular PR generalist. Enjoys terrible football and tonsorial topiary. World’s easiest going person (in Derby).
Search behaviour has changed for good
Generative AI (GenAI) has already changed the playbook for anyone in brand marketing as it begins to call the shots on where brands need to be seen and heard.
Where we look for different types of information has become more complex.
You need only explore some of the latest data to show the impact AI is having on brand awareness; data on the way that we access information using AI, how AI finds the information it provides to us, and how AI qualifies information.
All of the data indicates we’re entering an era where investing in brand is your key competitive edge for marketing strategy.
When we think about the impact of GenAI, search is arguably the biggest area to focus on first. For a long time, traditional search engines have been most people’s port of call when it comes to information around products, services, location, news… everything. But the search landscape is becoming more complex.
According to Deloitte data up to 2024 and projected into 2025, we can already see that adults’ daily use of GenAI apps in the UK is trending upwards – and at some rate. This comes as no surprise with the launch of ChatGPT, Grok, Perplexity and many more. But it does feel like, particularly this year, there has been a sudden surge in people adopting those apps for a bigger portion of their searches.
We can see the projections for this year’s data is that adults’ daily use of GenAI for work is predicted to surpass daily usage of traditional search engines for the first time. And that’s even before Google announced AI Mode, so we’ll likely see that blue line spike downwards much more.
Search channels have diversified
We can also see how searches are now diversifying too depending on the type of information and intent (data is from Semrush). Tank search manager, Connor Dowling, recently discussed this on the SEO for Ecommerce Podcast episode, Brand Visibility in the Age of AI.
“With Google we don’t typically type out a whole question, we might just search how to xyz, what is abc. AI reverses this. It has the ability to understand the context that we want to provide with our question and [AI] will provide you with completely tailored responses.”
So, as you can imagine, any information based search is now leaning towards AI overviews and GenAI Apps since people just want an answer to that query. They no longer have an immediate desire or reason to click through to a link. There is no other intent than to get an answer to their question.
These users will likely be those website visitors you might have tracked previously who were low intent and rarely converted to anything more than a visit. We know that many marketing managers are already feeling the impact from this sudden shift. We are seeing ‘zero click through’ becoming a reality for many search queries.
But at this point, transactional and high intent users are still likely to be the ones that come through to your website. Pretty soon, they may be the only ones who do.
The digital customer journey is seeing a huge shift. In some instances people can get everything they need to the point of purchase from a GenAI app. That’s what brands need to react to and understand – that many metrics of success, such as website visitors and sessions, are no longer something to track nor define your marketing efforts – for brand marketeers, maybe they never did.
Why brand is the one constant in the era of AI
Habits have changed for good. And they will continue to change as GenAI functionality and capabilities evolve. For brand marketers and comms professionals there is now a huge opportunity to re-emphasise the importance of brand across marketing efforts including PR, social and on-page, because that is exactly what AI is prioritising.
Brand has become the backbone of search success. Google and other GenAI apps are placing increased emphasis on trust and expertise when evaluating content to cite.
- Trusted brands get surfaced more often: Just like most humans, AI platforms prioritise names they recognise and trust.
- Brand visibility now matters more than clicks: AI summaries keep your brand front of mind, even without a visit.
- Brand is resilient to search changes: Strong brand presence stays true as algorithms and formats evolve.
- Brand lifts every part of your strategy: From media coverage, to SEO content, to paid media ads, a recognised brand improves reach, engagement and authority.
The factors AI typically uses to determine the best results
Just as Google has done for so long, AI algorithms work from signals or factors, and it uses those to measure whether your brand is trustworthy and authoritative enough to cite. It wants to provide its users with the best information possible so it looks at a number of signals including:
- Relevance to query: AI prioritises sources that directly address the user’s question or topic to ensure the response is accurate and useful.
- Source authority (E-E-A-T): Cites sources that demonstrate experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness to ensure credibility.
- Freshness: AI prefers up-to-date sources when recent information is critical, especially in fast-changing fields. Original research is going to be more important than ever before.
- User engagement signals: AI apps may favour sources that have high user trust, citations, or interaction, as these suggest reliability and usefulness. Think links, media coverage, branded search, reviews.
- Diversity of sources: AI draws from a variety of perspectives to avoid bias and provide a well-rounded answer.
- Language and clarity: AI selects sources that are clearly written and well-structured to enhance understanding.
- Reputation: AI prefers sources that have a good reputation as well as disclose their methods, authorship, and potential biases to support transparency and accountability. Crisis comms has a whole new reason to exist.
At the time of writing, these signals are consistent across GenAI apps but things are changing fast.
So, what does all this mean for brand visibility and strategy?
The brand authority that AI wants to see is from consistency across all your marketing channels; your messaging, your value and what your brand has to offer your audiences. GenAI is the new brand battleground with your competitors at all points of the funnel.
In the era of AI, you need to be AI’s choice to cite from when it answers users queries – especially in relation to relevant product or service questions. But appearing in wider topical and informational searches is also significant to your brand visibility.
Knowing who your audience is, where they are and what they want hasn’t changed but the importance of ensuring you are meeting them and their needs consistently across the whole marketing mix remains crucial to success. You need a clear brand strategy that brings your value consistently to what your audiences need across PR, social media, digital PR, content, SEO and paid advertising.
Investing in brand is your competitive edge
For those who understand the brand, they already know why it’s so important to customers and ensuring sales continue to increase long-term. There’s plenty of evidence out there that proves the commercial impact of brand awareness. But proving its ROI has been notoriously hard.
According to a recent Marketing Week piece of research, less than a fifth of marketers say their business invests in long-term brand health – demonstrating the challenge of convincing those who control budgets to make the required investment. But there is a big opportunity for those brands that do invest in their brand with a well structured strategy, to get ahead of competitors.
Being “brand visible” in AI brings new reasons to emphasise the importance of brand activity, good PR and a strong brand reputation. These activities will be decisive in whether or not you appear in the results your audiences are querying. Thus justifying the importance of brand marketing and helping teams demonstrate its value.
We help clients we work with to join up their internal and external marketing functions to deliver their brand value effectively to their audiences.
The one phrase that we are going to be saying time and time again in the following months and years is ‘consistent credibility’. In the world of brand, that is nothing new. The age of AI just brings an extra level of importance to get it right.
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