If you’ve felt the ground shift under Search, you’re not imagining it. AI Overviews, chat answers and social discovery are compressing the path from query to choice. Answers now appear before clicks, decisions happen faster, and your brand is judged in seconds by what machines can cite and people can trust.
Rather than chasing every acronym and latest AI features, We believe the answer for Brands and Marketers lies in going back to what has always worked: well-researched, data-backed, and personalised content that gives meaningful answers to users. While AI has changed the way people discover brands and make purchasing decisions, there are simple steps you can take to ensure your brand has strong strategic visibility towards your potential customers, regardless of where they are in their journey.
The Evolution of AI Search and Zero-Click Paths
The way people search for products, services, and information has fundamentally changed. Increasingly, we’re seeing these shifts:
- AI Chatbots & Agents: AI tools are providing direct answers, often without a user needing to visit a website. AI agents are even able to take actions for users, minimising interactions and shortening the path to a purchase.
- Zero-click search: Approximately 58–60% of searches end in zero-clicks, leading to a 15-25% drop in organic traffic for some businesses.
- Social Commerce: Social media platforms now offer more ways for users to search for and buy products directly, sometimes bypassing search engines entirely.
- Not just brands, but News publishers in particular have seen organic search traffic fall as users rely more on AI summaries, consistent across multiple independent reports.
According to a Search Engine Land report, Profound’s analysis reveals ChatGPT referral traffic dropped 52% since July 2025, suggesting it’s synthesising answers from a wider range of sources, including sites like Reddit and Wikipedia, rather than sending users directly to a specific article.
This doesn’t mean search is going away. Users still rely on traditional search to get their answers. However, platforms like Google and Microsoft are fully aware of how AI is influencing consumer behaviour. They are already offering ways to optimise for AI-powered answers.
With the shift in how people find information and make purchases, the new goal isn’t just about showing up in AI summaries. It’s about a complete digital strategy that makes your brand a credible, go-to source across all channels, including AI-powered responses across platforms.
A Practical Guide to Gaining AI Visibility
1. Stay informed, but make sure to look into your own customer data
Keep tracking AI search updates and trends, but don’t try to master every new acronym (whether it’s AIO, AEO, or GEO). The key insight is that your customers increasingly trust AI-generated answers when making decisions, not that you need to know every tech shorthand by heart.
When it comes to how acquisition has shifted with AI influence, your internal data is a goldmine. Don’t rely solely on generic industry benchmarks – talk to your sales team or conduct surveys to keep asking customers how they found your business. Use your Google Analytics (GA4) reports and channel performance data to understand how user behaviours and interaction patterns have changed over time.
- One quick tip for GA4 traffic: Analysing AI traffic at a session rather than user level can give you a more accurate picture of its impact on your site interactions.
2. Winning in the AI era starts with the digital branding fundamentals
Before you try to optimise for every new AI feature, focus on the basics: a great product or service, helpful content, and a user-friendly site.
- Quality and well-structured content and websites: Create a website and content that answers your users’ questions about that product.
- Consistent digital experience: Ensure your content, ads, and images are all consistent and work together to provide a seamless brand experience.
- Build brand engagement and trust: Actively build brand preference and engage directly with your audience through newsletters, apps, or other offline touchpoints.
Your customers’ conversations about your brand are becoming more and more important. AI systems like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity rely heavily on community-driven platforms and user-generated posts, especially on Reddit and Wikipedia, as a foundational layer for their answers. Ensure an active, positive, and factually correct presence wherever AI models go looking, be it a Wikipedia entry, a top Reddit thread, or a high-authority review platform.
3. Optimise for AI, Not Just Humans
The core principles of good SEO, particularly Google’s E-E-A-T framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), are now more critical than ever. In the past, E-E-A-T helped Google’s algorithms rank websites for human users, but today it is the foundation for optimising your content for AI.
- Clear Structure: Use clear headings, bullet points, tables, and short paragraphs. This isn’t just about human readability; it’s a direct optimisation for an AI’s ability to extract information cleanly.
- Demonstrate Expertise and Authority: Go beyond simply stating facts. Showcase author expertise by including real author names, professional bios, and links to their social profiles or other credible work. Secure mentions and backlinks from other reputable websites and industry sources, as these act as endorsements that a third party trusts your information.
- Focus on clear Content Structure: While we’ve always used headings and bullet points for readability, this is now a technical requirement for AI.
- Rigorously fact-check: The importance of accurate information cannot be overstated. AI systems are designed to synthesise a single, coherent answer from multiple sources.
4. Track what matters, attribute what counts
Gaining AI visibility is only half the battle; the other half is measuring it effectively. With AI traffic continuing to take on new shapes and forms, native analytics tools still have blind spots when it comes to AI-driven sources. This makes it difficult to determine their true impact on user engagement and conversion, leading to missed opportunities for optimising your digital strategy and your content efforts.
To overcome these tracking challenges and get a clearer picture, we suggest the following strategies:
- Utilise Multi-Touch Attribution: Since many AI-influenced journeys do not result in an immediate click to your site, it is vital to map assisted conversions. An AI-generated answer might prime a user who then conducts a branded search or visits your site directly at a later time. Multi-touch attribution models can help surface this hidden influence and connect the dots between the initial AI touchpoint and the final conversion.
- Implement Third-Party Tracking: Adopt third-party AI snippet tracking tools to monitor where and how your brand appears in AI-generated answers. While dedicated platforms like Authoritas, AlsoAsked, and Nozzle have developed specific modules for AI visibility, major SEO suites such as Semrush and Screaming Frog are also integrating AI citation tracking into their feature sets.
- Monitor Branded mentions: Actively track brand mentions across community-driven sites like Reddit and Wikipedia, as well as on review platforms. AI models frequently cite these sources to synthesise their answers, making your presence and positive reputation on them crucial for visibility.
Future-Proofing Your Brand Visibility
The landscape may be evolving at breakneck speed, but we believe one principle remains unchanged: consistently create valuable, trustworthy content that genuinely helps your audience, consistently across all owned digital platforms. By focusing on your users and adapting to new ways of reaching them, you can ensure your brand stays seen, no matter how the internet evolves.
If you’re ready to get a clear picture of your brand’s AI visibility and build a strategy that works, talk to an ADMATICian today. We can help you measure and improve your presence across both organic and paid channels, making sure you’re seen wherever your customers are.