Can Customers Find Your Brand? Marketing Strategies for AI-Driven Search

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AI platforms have already upended online search in the first few years they’ve been available, and businesses were woefully unprepared for them. Depending on your company’s strategy, AI-driven search can bring significant opportunity or grave risk to its online visibility. Big brands can gain even more market share if they act shrewdly and with haste, while small brands now have a new marketing channel that can help level the playing field.

How many dollars that your company invested to cement market leadership in the past will translate into success in next-generation search? The answer is not yet clear. The ways consumers look for information are changing at breakneck speed, with many shifting from traditional search engines to generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.

The fundamental issue: Customers must be able to find your brand in order to consider, desire, or buy your offerings. For top-of-funnel consumers to find your company, AI’s opaque and evolving algorithms must be able to find your brand first and then prioritize it in a preferred position in search results. Invisibility on AI platforms risks dire consequences, even for brands that lead in market share. 

Strategic companies can adapt and prepare for the future by understanding the Information Search Marketing (ISM) framework.  ISM encompasses all marketing activities aimed at having content appear more visibly — ideally, at the top of result lists — on digital search platforms. ISM includes traditional search as well as new, AI-based mechanisms. Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the process of optimizing content so that a brand appears in responses generated by AI-based platforms, while generative engine marketing (GEM) is the effort to appear as a promotional ad next to relevant AI responses. GEO is to GEM as SEO is to SEM. ISM is an umbrella term that includes all of the current mechanisms and those yet to be developed. 

The Five A’s to Compete Successfully.  To adapt, companies must adopt a new ISM strategy immediately, attending to each of the four consumer search methods (SEM, GEM, SEO, and GEO). If your brand is not engaging in at least one of them, it’s likely that your leads are dropping. According to one search-focused agency CEO, Google is still the primary tool used for traditional searches, but GEO is growing faster than any other new marketing channel has in years. 

The five A’s of search success can help businesses better understand and adapt to next-generation search, by highlighting the fundamental areas that companies must focus on to capitalize on the potential of traditional and AI search platforms.  

1. Authority. This refers to a brand’s credibility and trustworthiness on a platform and is defined differently by each ISM method. Brands must now focus on building authority in multiple ways to maintain and grow trust, especially among younger consumers.
2. Answers. Answering user questions is at the core of all ISM activities. Marketers must adjust to platforms where a query results in a single answer as opposed to multiple pages of responses. 
3. Arrangement. Preferred data arrangements/structures differ by platform. Coding — the schema, markup, and structured data — must be presented in the language most easily decoded by the ISM method to ensure that the information is found and valued by the platform. 
4. Attribution. Companies must develop appropriate measurement mechanisms based on the marketing objectives of the ISM tactic used. 
5. Agnostic alignment. Marketers should not become attached to a “favorite” search tool. Stay zoomed out and observe as behaviors shift; if a tool proves to have scale, address it. Learn about as many tools as possible, test them, and then incorporate those that work best into your strategy.

Three Ways to Capture the Opportunity.  Never before have society, technology, and marketing changed this fast. It’s bringing real business risk for brands that don’t navigate the shift properly. A great Google Search ranking will not be as impressive when consumers have shifted to AI platforms, just as having a great position in the Yellow Pages doesn’t mean what it once did.  Companies can immediately implement these three steps to take advantage of AI’s potential and avoid being left behind.  Reallocate resources to ISM.  Choose the right people to execute your strategy.  And be ambitious in improving the measurement and attribution of ISM performance.

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