"Search used to be simple: a question, a page of blue links and a fight to win the click. Brand discovery was essentially a story about rankings, keywords and referral traffic. That's no longer how people find answers. As AI assistants and generative search become the first place people turn to for information, many buyers are getting what they need before they ever reach a website."
"In an AI-first environment, your goal is to earn a place in the answer. People may learn about your company without ever visiting your website, and the quality of that impression often matters more than the volume of traffic you receive. Brand discovery becomes less about How much traffic did we get? and more about When someone asks about this problem, does our brand show up in the explanation, and how are we framed?"
"AI-generated answers now function as a new layer in the funnelone that sits between awareness and consideration. It's tempting to view generative search as a technical task to hand off to SEO or engineering. But AI systems don't just crawl your website; they pull from news coverage, analyst commentary, reviews, social conversations, forums and reference sites. In other words, they read the same places humans do when they're trying to decide whether a brand is credible. That makes AI visibility a communications issue."
Search has shifted from a click-driven model of blue links and rankings to AI assistants that synthesize answers. Buyers increasingly receive concise, blended responses before visiting websites, making first impressions from those answers critical. Brand discovery now depends on appearing in AI-generated explanations and on the framing of brand mentions. Generative search operates as an intermediate funnel layer between awareness and consideration. AI systems pull from news, analyst commentary, reviews, social conversations, forums and reference sites, so visibility depends on earned coverage and broader communications signals. AI visibility therefore requires communications strategy beyond traditional SEO.
Read at www.forbes.com
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