MTM Brand and Strategy Director Richard Broughton explores how AI-driven discovery is reshaping brand visibility.
The way people discover and choose brands online is changing. As AI-driven search and recommendation tools create more answer-focused experiences, fewer journeys begin or end with a click. For marketers, this requires a wider, more integrated perspective, bringing disciplines like SEO and Brand Strategy together into a unified approach.
While AI may narrow down and present options, human decisions still ultimately hinge on trust, emotion and familiarity. In this new landscape, visibility, credibility and machine readability are fueled by brand salience, ensuring your brand remains chosen by both people and AI, even if fewer searches reach your website.
ChatGPT, the travel agent
I got married last summer – a simple do at a friend’s country pub, significantly enhanced by an incredible band and an open bar. It required very little planning, and I actually found the whole thing quite fun.
In stark contrast, I found organising our honeymoon across the South of France to be a Herculean task. The pressure of designing what had to be the ‘best holiday of our lives’ was a lot, and I understood why my ever-smart wife was so happy to relinquish all responsibility. As the weeks ticked by and the stakes continued to grow, I turned to ChatGPT for help to overcome my increasingly panic-induced inertia and plan this sodding magical trip.
On one level, using AI felt like a failure of effort on my part: a cheat code to access the collective recommendations of everyone from Condé Nast Traveller to TripAdvisor to The Michelin Guide. I knew I could do the work myself, but this felt easier, quicker and similar, I imagine, to an executive asking their assistant to purchase their other half’s birthday gift. They know they shouldn’t, but where’s the harm, right?
In the end, I accepted I was now the kind of person who used AI to plan their honeymoon and got stuck in. It certainly wasn’t instantaneous, but with some significant back-and-forth, it helped me build out the itinerary, shortlist hotels, and find restaurants and attractions that met specific criteria. It was incredibly useful, and within a few hours, I had a day-by-day plan that would have taken days of browsing.
That was in July, but more recently, with my tan a distant memory, I was listening to a podcast with Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince, and I realised our little French getaway was representative of a larger shift. In this episode, Prince set out an interesting position. He argued that for 30 years, the web operated on a simple pact: let search engines crawl your content, and they will send you the traffic you want. However, the rise of LLMs and the influence of answer-focused experiences, according to Prince, is breaking that agreement. As ever more answers are consumed within the interface, fewer people are actually clicking through to the source website. His remedy, albeit aimed at creators and publishers, is control: the technical ability to block, allow or charge AI crawlers so that value flows by consent rather than extraction.
You can see the logic in that approach for those where content is their product, but what about those selling a physical product or a service? AI isn’t going to pay you to crawl your site, I can promise you that. So, should every brand out there be panicking that they will soon be invisible online? I don’t think we’re there…yet.
When I was ‘collaborating’ with Chat on my honeymoon, I still cross-checked a lot of its suggestions and recommendations. I looked up places on Google and Instagram, read a few reviews, explored websites, and often ended up opting for places I had found myself on social, in something I actually read, or through a friend’s recommendation. Chat narrowed the field and gave me some great steers, but ultimately, AI-driven discovery only took me so far , personal opinions, trust, and a few brand cues still made most of the decisions, and that’s worth keeping in mind.
Discovery beyond clicks
It is important not to twist Prince’s point. His argument was built for creators and publishers, but the ripple effect will reach other brands as well. His focus is on the economics of the open web; the imbalance between content creators and platforms when answers are consumed in place, and the click disappears.
Publishers monetise traffic, so when that traffic dries up, so does the revenue, but brands operate differently. We don’t sell clicks; we build demand and loyalty. Traffic remains important, but what we actually compete for is salience, being the brand that comes to mind and feels safe or appealing to choose. The challenge, therefore, is not how to reclaim every click, but how to be visible, trusted and credited at the moment of acceptance, even if the click never materialises.
AI vs. Google search: the real scale of search behaviour
Pragmatism first. Google still dominates search, and according to figures from September 2025, Google processes 14 billion searches daily, compared to Chat GPT’s 66 million, indicating that Google is still 210 times bigger (these figures are hotly debated). AI-based discovery is already significant and growing, but it is not yet the predominant behaviour for most people most of the time, and that’s also vital to remember.
Prevalence and impact also differ by category and query type. Independent tracking shows that Google’s AI Overviews appear on a meaningful but uneven share of searches. Where they do appear, click-through rates to the source page often decrease, although there are reports of negligible impact for some publishers earlier in the rollout. Just like with my honeymoon planning, you can hold both ideas at once. On low-stakes queries, many users accept the summary and move on. On higher-stakes decisions, people still verify across Google, social platforms, and established media before making a choice. Discovery has not ended; it’s just that the choreography has changed.
Acceptance over discovery
The web used to reward discovery. Now it increasingly rewards acceptance. This means that the line between brand and performance marketing is also blurring. When the answer arrives in the interface, the window for influence shrinks, but that doesn’t make brand building less important; it makes it more important. The moment of choice is compressed, so if people already know you and feel comfortable choosing you, AI’s suggestions become a nudge rather than a verdict.
In 2026, two forces will shape how brands grow. The first is human recognition; the memories, feelings and associations that make your brand feel like the obvious choice. The second is machine readability; the clarity, provenance and authority that make an AI system comfortable referencing you. Success today, more than ever, comes from holding both: being the brand a person instinctively trusts and the source a system can safely include.
As AI compresses the customer journey, memory and authority influence the decision long before a measurable click occurs. This demands new ways to evaluate visibility, attribution, and intent beyond traditional web metrics. To explore further how memory, emotion and attention shape brand perception, take a look at The psychology behind brand: Leveraging cognitive psychology for a memorable impact.
Who creates and who captures value
If answer consumption happens in place and bots harvest content without the return leg, creators will push for control, consent, and, at times, compensation. Cloudflare’s position is one version of this. The licensing deals between LLMs and major publishers are another. None of this settles the issue. It points to a future where access is negotiated and credit is explicit, a kind of content clearinghouse for AI, potentially.
This matters for brands as creators more than you may think. The more original your contribution, the stronger your hand. Robust evidence that can be cited without payment will travel better than pages written to be scraped, and may be preferred to citing sources that incur a licensing residual. Brands with proprietary data, credible studies, transparent methods and consistent claims will find themselves included more often and misrepresented less. Brands that flood the web with derivative blogs and comment pieces (much like this!) will likely struggle to show up in an AI response.
Brand and performance without the fight
There’s always been a tendency to pit brand and performance against each other, like rival religions. In an answer-focused world, that argument is even more redundant. The bottom of the funnel hasn’t disappeared; it’s just moved closer to the top. So, when assistants handle more of the synthesis, memory takes on more of the decision-making, and authority plays a greater role in guiding. It’s a familiar balance that remains; long-term brand building creates the mental availability that drives short-term demand capture. The exact ratio will vary by category and price point, but the principle stays the same.
Measurement is where the challenge lies. If journeys are shorter, the click happens after the decision, not before. That makes it a lagging indicator, useful for tracking outcomes but not for shaping them. Brand and marketing teams will need earlier signs of how people actually decide. Are you showing up in the answers that matter, and are you being named accurately when you do? Are your distinctive assets doing their job? Are people searching for you directly, even as more queries are resolved in place?
It's a reminder that brand and performance don't exist in isolation; they’re most effective when they work in harmony. As explored in our recent blog, Integrating PR, organic social, SEO and paid: A strategy that works, the convergence of disciplines once seen as separate is driving stronger visibility, credibility and ROI.
Balance, not panic
It’s important to note that none of this is universal. Low-stakes choices will increasingly be accepted in place. High-stakes decisions will still be triangulated through Google, social media, and trusted outlets, but some categories will experience this shift earlier than others. That’s why the right approach is balance, not rapid change. Continue with the slow, consistent efforts that make you the obvious human choice. Enhance the clarity, originality, and trustworthiness that ensure you are the reassuring machine recommendation. With a clear mind, decide what you are happy to let the market discover for free, what you want to be credited for, and where you expect value to return.
Capturing brand visibility in AI search
Back on the Riviera, ChatGPT did exactly what it promised. It shortened the path from question to answer. I still chose the names that lived in my head or provided the right trust and brand cues, and I still looked for proof before I committed. This, in my opinion, is likely the reality for most people most of the time right now. Machines will keep getting faster at answering, but humans will continue to make the decision. If the web is going to click less often, our job is to make sure we are already the brand people intend to choose, and the one the machine is comfortable referencing.
We are an AI search optimisation agency
At MTM, we help brands stay visible, trusted and chosen in an increasingly AI-driven search landscape. Our integrated approach blends brand strategy, content, and technical expertise to optimise for both human audiences and machine discovery. For enhancing search visibility to build credibility that AI can read and reference, we make sure your brand stands out, wherever and however people are searching.
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FAQs
What is brand salience?
Brand salience refers to how prominently a brand comes to mind when a consumer is considering a product or service category. In other words, it measures the likelihood and ease with which a brand is remembered or noticed in buying situations.
What is the future of search?
Search is evolving from a list of links to a dynamic AI-driven conversation. Tools like Chat GPT, Google’s AI overviews, and Perplexity are transforming how people find information, shifting from keyword-based results to intenet led, conversational answers. Users now expect fast, context-aware responses, whether through voice, visual or social search.
For marketers, this means visibility depends less on rankings alone and more on structured data, authority, and the ability to be understood by machines as well as people. To explore how AI, evolving platforms, and changing consumer behaviour are redefining SEO, read our blog: The future of search: How AI is reshaping discovery and SEO.
What is AI search optimisation?
AI search optimisation focuses on improving how your brand and content are understood, referenced, and surfaced by AI tools such as ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and other answer-based search tools. It's an expansion of traditional SEO to ensure your brand is visible and credible in both human and machine-led discovery.
Will ChatGPT replace Google?
Not entirely, ChatGPT and other AI-driven tools are transforming how people search, but they are complementing rather than fully replacing traditional search engines like Google. While AI provides quick, conversational answers and helps narrow options, Google still dominates global search with billions of daily queries. Users continue to verify information across multiple sources, including social platforms, review sites, and authoritative websites.