For decades, building a brand followed a reliable formula: reach your audience, repeat the message, and build a reputation through time and trust, but that playbook is rapidly becoming obsolete. Today, search, social, and smart systems, particularly generative AI, are the front doors to brand discovery. These systems are reshaping how content is consumed, trust is established, influence is earned, and reputations are won or lost. The companies that will thrive in this new reality aren’t just using AI as a tool. They recognize that AI is the new terrain.
From Intent to Influence: How Search Is Evolving
Traditional search was built on human intent. Users typed questions and brands optimized for keywords, but with large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, the customer journey is collapsing into a single answer, curated and served by an algorithm trained on millions of data points. Instead of serving a menu of links, AI assistants are increasingly serving recommendations, filtering what users see, and shaping what they believe.
The Wall Street Journal recently cited research by Datos Intelligence, revealing that 5.6% of all U.S. desktop search traffic in July 2025 went to AI-powered large language models, a dramatic increase from just 2.48% a year prior. Even more notably, Bain & Company found that shopping-related prompts to ChatGPT surged 25% in the first half of 2025, signaling that consumers are turning to AI to make purchasing decisions for them. In this reality, brands need to be the answer, not an option.
That shift brings us to a new strategic imperative: optimizing for AI visibility. A recent Avenue Z research report, the AI Visibility Index for Digital Banks, discovered that just 10 brands accounted for 83% of all AI-generated responses to common queries like “best checking account for young professionals” or “bank with no overdraft fees.” Nearly one in four brands studied didn’t appear in a single LLM-generated answer. Even legacy giants like Bank of America and Wells Fargo, with billion-dollar brand budgets, showed sub-15% inclusion rates in many AI results. What this proves is that AI systems aren’t ranking brands based on size or advertising spend. They reward structured content, semantic clarity, and relevance.
To optimize for AI visibility, brands need structured data, clean content hierarchies, and a strong ecosystem of third-party credibility signals. Think of it as reputation engineering at scale.
Content That Learns
This reality requires a shift in how we think about content. In the AI economy, content is training data for learning systems that are increasingly powering customer experiences. These systems are trained on what we publish, where we’re mentioned, and how we’re perceived.
This means brand communications need to do double duty: inform the audience and train the machines.
Every blog post, FAQ page, press release, or podcast transcript teaches AI models how to categorize and interpret your brand. Content speaks to humans and teaches AI what your brand stands for. Inconsistent messaging confuses customers and degrades your performance in AI-powered discovery.
Brands like Chime and Varo, which consistently refer to themselves as “fee-free” or “banking for Gen Z,” saw higher inclusion in AI answers related to budgeting and banking alternatives. Meanwhile, brands with fragmented or overly complex messaging, those trying to be a neobank, a crypto wallet, and a lending platform all at once, struggled to rank at all.
Generative AI: Risk, Reward, and Reputation
Of course, with generative content creation on the rise, the risks are just as high as the rewards. The explosion of tools like Claude, Jasper, and Writer means brands can produce thousands of pieces of content at scale, but scale without standards is dangerous.
Done right, this offers an unprecedented opportunity to control narrative and compound reach. Done wrong, it risks reputational dilution, legal exposure, or both.
Without human oversight, generative outputs risk off-brand messaging, hallucinated claims, and regulatory issues. Worse, they can distort the very data being used to evaluate your business. The winners in this space are approaching AI not as a shortcut, but as a strategic amplifier. They’re building editorial guardrails, prioritizing human-in-the-loop processes, and designing content for AI-native distribution. As the data shows, 83% of large organizations have reported measurable SEO gains from integrating AI, but only when paired with structured oversight.
AI doesn’t absolve you of responsibility. It multiplies it.
Customer Acquisition Is Getting Smarter
AI is fundamentally reshaping customer acquisition and performance media. Predictive targeting, automated media buying, and generative creative are reducing waste and boosting precision. But if your brand isn’t ready to feed those systems with the right signals, you’ll be outbid before the auction starts.
In our research, digital banks that aligned PR messaging, website content, and paid media strategy under a unified brand taxonomy consistently ranked higher in LLM queries. AI rewards brands that are consistent across every touchpoint, including paid, earned, and owned
To succeed, brands must break down silos. Data, creative, and communications teams can no longer operate on parallel tracks. AI rewards cohesion. Your ad copy, website structure, press mentions, and influencer partnerships all inform how you’re interpreted by algorithms. Alignment is now table stakes.
Crisis, Capital, and the New Real-Time Economy
This is especially crucial during moments of peak visibility. Whether it’s a funding round, a merger announcement, or a viral backlash, high-stakes moments are now mediated by AI.
Today, AI engines are the intermediaries. Journalists use AI to find stories. Investors use AI to read market signals. Customers use AI to decide what, and who, they trust. When your brand is in the spotlight, narrative speed is narrative strength. But speed without alignment is chaos. Winning brands are those that can rapidly deploy coordinated narratives across media, web, and AI channels simultaneously. Narrative agility is the new brand equity.
The Strategic “Why Now” for Executives
So why does this matter now? Because AI is accelerating asymmetry.
Smaller, faster-moving brands are leapfrogging category incumbents by understanding how to train and integrate with these systems. In fact, in the AI Visibility Index for Digital Banks, we found that multiple growth-stage brands with fewer resources still ranked higher in common LLM answers than household names like Citi or Capital One. These insurgents didn’t win with volume. They won with strategy.
Your brand is already being indexed, interpreted, and served up by AI models, whether you’ve prepared for it or not. This is not a trend. It’s a transformation.
This is a call to action for every CMO, founder, investor, and board member: treat AI as the backbone of your modern brand strategy.
The future of influence won’t be bought. It will be built, algorithm by algorithm and word by word.
