Updated: November 2025
How your company is being discovered online is changing. Brand website traffic is declining and there is a growing preference for AI-generated answers from search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Mode.
We’re entering a new era of online discovery—one where a brand’s visibility depends not on how well your site ranks, but on where and how you’re mentioned across the internet.
Table of Contents:
- Overview: What Should Brands Do To Increase AI Discoverability?
- The Rise of No-Click (or Low-Click) Behavior
- Where Does AI Search Get Its Answers?
- Tips for Creating Content that Drives AI Search Visibility
Overview: What Should Brands Do To Increase AI Discoverability?
If you need a quick reference for adjusting your strategies, this is the list for you. If you want an in-depth guide, skip this and keep reading.
- Invest in earned media. Prioritize listicle inclusion, features, interviews and thought leadership. Provide expert commentary and share company news in trade publications and national news outlets. These are high-signal sources for AI models.
- Build topical authority across platforms. Publish in-depth content that serves as a source of truth for a core subject. Then amplify your expertise through press releases, bylines, news coverage, LinkedIn posts, podcasts, newsletters, etc. Ideally, do this quarterly to secure, grow and maintain your standing.
- Show up positively on social media. Public conversations on platforms like LinkedIn and Reddit are often indexed by AI tools. How your brand and products are spoken about matters.
- Show expertise. Infuse your content with unique insights, quotes, FAQs, Q&As, original data, case studies, or first-hand experience. Clearly feature author bios with their credentials and experience.
- Structure your owned content. Use schema markup, headlines, bullet points, numbered steps and comparison tables for information that is easily scannable and digestible for AI systems. Support text with high-quality images, charts and diagrams, and use descriptive alt text and captions so that AI can properly analyze them.
- Publish consistently and update content. To ensure content remains fresh, publish regularly (recommended every 28 days) to maintain relevance. And don’t forget to update older content with the latest statistics. AI often favors recently updated information for evolving topics.
- Adjust performance metrics. Track brand awareness, share of voice and AI visibility instead of relying on website traffic alone. And if you’re heavily involved with content development, consider these new KPIs.
The Rise of No-Click (or Low-Click) Behavior
In recent years, Google’s click-through rates have steadily declined. The rise of zero-click searches—where users get what they need without leaving the results page—has been well documented.
AI-generated summaries reduce the need for users to click at all. When answers are generated in-line, visibility shifts from your website to whether your brand is referenced—either directly or indirectly—in the sources AI pulls from.
This marks a needed shift for marketers who prioritize website traffic as a primary success metric. Tracking brand awareness, share of voice and AI visibility scoring will continue to rise in importance.
Good News: People still click away from AI search, just less often. But when measured by conversion rate, the average visitor referred by AI search is 4.4 times as valuable as the average visit from traditional organic search. Coming to your site with many of their questions already answered by LLMs, visitors are better prepared to make a purchase decision.
Where Does AI Search Get Its Answers?
Unlike traditional SEO, AI doesn’t reward keyword density. When determining which sources to cite, AI surfaces brands and voices that appear in credible, contextual and relevant content.
Here are a few interesting stats about AI search sourcing…
- Muck Rack’s report, “What Is AI Reading?”, found that 95% of AI citations come from non-paid media and that 49% of citations for timely queries originate from journalistic content.
- Ahrefs found that AI platforms all work a little differently, with only 14% of the top 50 mentioned sources shared across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI.
And here’s a look at top AI references:
- News media: Included when users search for timely information, expert analysis or topic overviews. AI often surfaces trusted publishers like Business Insider, Reuters, Axios, New York Times and industry trade publications.
- Industry organizations and associations: Included when a query requires subject expertise, industry standards or authoritative guidance on niche topics.
- Government and public institutions: Included for policy, regulatory, scientific and economic information. Agencies like the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics and FDA supply verified data.
- Academic research and scholarly databases: Included when a question requires evidence, scientific backing or peer reviewed research. University publications and open-access repositories offer high credibility.
- LinkedIn: Included for professional insights, leadership perspectives and industry commentary. AI often cites posts from credible voices with demonstrated expertise.
- Reddit + Quora: Included when queries involve real-world experiences, community perspectives or practical problem solving.
- YouTube: Included for how-to instructions, visual explanations and step-by-step learning. AI analyzes video transcripts to pull reliable summaries or guidance.
- Company websites: Included for product details, comparisons or official explanations. Help centers, FAQs and product pages supply direct information from the source.
- High-quality blogs: Included when niche expertise or deep subject knowledge is required. Can surface in areas where specialized insight matters.
Tips for Creating Content that Drives AI Search Visibility
This shift presents a quiet but urgent challenge for brands: if you’re not present in the sources AI pulls from, you simply don’t exist in the new search ecosystem.
To compete in this new environment, brands need to optimize for new layers:
News Media
Generative AI systems rely heavily on trusted, well-sourced reporting to shape their answers. Industry trade outlets, business publications and expert commentary help AI validate information and understand which brands carry authority in their space.
Being quoted or mentioned in these outlets strengthens your credibility and increases the likelihood that your brand will appear in AI-powered summaries. Showing up consistently compounds this effect over time.
AI Visibility Tips for Earned Content
- Maintain a consistent drumbeat of news – Steady updates signal that your brand is active and evolving. Regular coverage in credible publications makes it easier for AI to recognize your expertise and reference your brand in relevant contexts. Quarterly announcements, product improvements, new partnerships or data-driven insights help AI systems keep an accurate picture of your organization.
- Optimize press releases for AI interpretability – Press releases teach AI how to describe and contextualize your brand. Improve visibility by using clear structure, descriptive headlines, schema markup and concise explanations of what the announcement means for users. Including short FAQs aligned with real queries helps AI understand your key messages.
- Contribute to third-party content ecosystems – Listicles, rankings, awards, reviews and expert features carry strong authority signals. Being included in external summaries or comparison pieces ensures AI has multiple trustworthy references to pull from when answering user questions.
- Provide expert commentary proactively – AI often cites perspectives from subject matter experts. Offering timely insights, data-backed points of view and commentary tied to industry trends increases the volume of credible mentions associated with your brand.
- Publish proprietary insights that journalists want to cover – Original data, surveys or trend reports often attract earned media coverage, which in turn gives AI more high-quality signals about your expertise.
Social Content
AI tools increasingly track social signals to understand which brands are active, trusted and relevant within their communities. Although social posts are not always cited directly, patterns in engagement, sentiment and publicly available content influence how AI interprets brand authority.
AI Visibility Tips for Shared Content
- Strengthen employee advocacy and executive presence on LinkedIn – Professional conversations and thought leadership contribute to how AI interprets expertise, especially when posts provide clear insights or industry context.
- Use social listening to monitor how people talk about your brand – Recurring questions, common language and sentiment trends help you shape content that aligns with what AI identifies as relevant and useful. Public conversations in these spaces inform how AI understands real-world experiences, troubleshooting steps and user opinions.
- Publish helpful content that answers real user questions – Clear explanations and practical guidance are more likely to match search intent. AI favors content that solves problems or provides clarity.
- Share customer stories and practical use cases – Structured, firsthand experiences help AI describe your brand more accurately in scenario-based queries.
- Collaborate with credible voices – Partner with influencers for tutorials, comparisons and detailed reviews. AI can analyze public content on social platforms by reading transcripts and captions. Influencers who spark meaningful discussion provide additional relevance signals since community interaction helps AI detect useful, trusted content.
Owned Content
While third-party sources carry significant weight in AI search, your own website still plays a supporting role. You can help AI tools understand, trust and surface your content by writing about what your audience is searching for and following technical best practices.
AI Visibility Tips for Owned Content
- Prioritize page structure – Keywords help AI classify your pages, but structure matters for crawlability. Use descriptive headings, FAQ blocks, alt text and clean formatting so LLMs can interpret context without guesswork.
- Apply schema markup to strengthen interpretability – Tag authorship, dates, product details, FAQs, articles and reviews. Structured data makes your content easier for AI and search engines to crawl, categorize and reference.
- Publish accurate, up-to-date content regularly – AI systems look for consistency and freshness. Recent, well-maintained content increases the likelihood that your site will be referenced or summarized.
- Don’t rely on PDF-only formats – AI can read PDFs when the text is accessible, but they are harder to interpret due to formatting, lack of structure and limited metadata. Important content should appear as a webpage first, or alongside a PDF version.
- Publish case studies, unique data and proprietary insights – AI prioritizes original information and data. Benchmarks, trend reports and real examples increase your likelihood of being cited in research-oriented queries.
- Create pages with direct answers, summaries and comparison tables – People rely on AI to identify options and evaluate alternatives. Clear explanations of where your brand fits, direct answers to best or alternatives to questions and structured formats improve visibility for informational and decision support queries.
- Provide technical and how-to guidance – AI frequently pulls from instructional content. Tutorials, step-by-step guides and practical resources signal that your brand can help users get things done. Offering templates or tools and engaging in public troubleshooting conversations reinforces this expertise.
What’s Next? Feeding the New Discoverability Engine
Public relations is no longer just about credibility or reach. It’s about indexability. A strategic PR program creates the kind of third-party, high-authority mentions that AI systems prioritize and promote.
If your brand is quoted in a trade piece, national news story, mentioned in a product roundup or referenced in an expert’s LinkedIn post, that content becomes a node in the AI knowledge graph.
In 2025 and beyond, visibility isn’t just about clicks—it’s about mentions and optimization. It’s about being part of the sources AI trusts, the conversations your audience pays attention to and the content ecosystems that shape perception before a user ever lands on your site.