For decades, brand building was fundamentally about winning human attention. Brands fought for shelf space, search rankings, advertising real estate and, increasingly, social feeds. The objective was visibility: get noticed, remembered and considered.
AI is changing the nature of that competition. Increasingly, the first “person” evaluating a brand may not be a person at all. It could be an AI search engine, recommendation system or shopping agent deciding which brands to present to a consumer — and which ones to leave out.
That creates a new challenge for marketers: brands must not only be discoverable by people; they must also be understandable, credible and recommendable to machines.
The shift is already visible in search. Google’s 2026 research on AI Search in India describes a move away from the traditional linear customer journey towards conversational, multimodal and increasingly agentic search. Instead of typing a few keywords and scanning a page of links, consumers can describe what they want in natural language and expect AI to narrow down the options.
For brands, that changes what “being visible” means.
From ranking to being recommended
Traditional search engine optimisation was largely about competing for rankings. AI-powered discovery introduces another layer: whether a brand has enough relevance, context and authority to be included in an AI-generated answer.
The distinction matters because an AI-generated response can effectively become the shortlist.
Adobe has documented the rapid growth of this behaviour. Its analysis of more than one trillion visits to US retail websites found that traffic from generative AI sources rose 1,200% in February 2025 compared with July 2024. Its survey of more than 5,000 consumers also found that 39% had already used generative AI for online shopping, while 53% planned to do so during 2025. Product recommendations were among the most common shopping applications.
The trajectory has continued. Adobe subsequently reported a 3,500% increase in traffic to US retail sites from generative AI sources between July 2024 and May 2025.
This does not mean traditional SEO has suddenly become irrelevant. Rather, marketers now have to think beyond the search results page. The question is no longer simply, “Can consumers find us?” It is increasingly, “When consumers ask AI which brands they should consider, will we be among the answers?”
Data becomes part of the brand
This makes the quality of a brand’s digital information increasingly important.
AI systems need to understand what a brand sells, who it serves, how its products differ, where they are available and why consumers should trust them. Vague positioning and fragmented product information become liabilities when machines are synthesising information on behalf of consumers.
McKinsey’s State of Fashion 2026 report identifies generative engine optimisation (GEO) as an increasingly important counterpart to SEO. It points to clear product titles, descriptions and metadata as fundamentals because AI systems need structured, contextualised and credible information to surface products effectively.
Google Cloud makes the same argument in its discussion of the “invisible shelf” of agentic commerce: brands need to treat data almost like digital packaging, because AI agents increasingly need to discover, understand and potentially purchase products on behalf of consumers.
For marketers, this means product feeds, websites, reviews, FAQs, specifications, corporate information and third-party coverage are no longer merely operational assets. Together, they form the information ecosystem from which AI can construct a brand’s identity.
Trust becomes a competitive advantage
There is another reason brand building matters more, rather than less, in an AI-mediated world: machines need signals of credibility.
An AI model may synthesise information from a brand’s own website, independent reviews, media coverage, expert commentary and other sources. A brand that has a consistent story across these environments gives AI more reliable material from which to build an answer.
That makes authority and reputation particularly valuable.
It also means marketers should resist the temptation to treat GEO as simply another keyword game. Stuffing pages with phrases designed to attract AI crawlers is unlikely to substitute for genuine expertise, useful information and a consistent brand proposition.
The strongest AI-era brands may therefore be those that are simultaneously easy to understand and difficult to dispute.
The new brand-building metric
AI also challenges the metrics marketers have traditionally used to evaluate brand visibility.
Impressions, rankings, clicks and share of voice will remain useful, but they do not fully capture whether a brand is being represented correctly inside AI-generated answers.
Adobe, for example, has argued that brands need new measures around AI visibility, sentiment and citation frequency. In its own experiments, the company said optimisation of Adobe Firefly pages produced a fivefold increase in citations in LLM responses, while Acrobat pages saw a 200% increase in LLM visibility.
Google is also beginning to build measurement directly into its commerce ecosystem. Its AI Performance Insights tool is designed to show merchants how products are discovered across AI Mode and AI Overviews, although the feature is initially rolling out to a limited set of Merchant Center accounts.
The implication is significant: AI visibility is becoming measurable, and eventually it may become as closely managed as search visibility.
From awareness to decision-readiness
Ultimately, AI does not eliminate the fundamentals of brand building. It makes them more consequential.
Distinctive brands still need awareness. They still need emotional resonance, cultural relevance and a compelling proposition. But those qualities now need to coexist with something new: machine-readable clarity.
A successful AI-era brand should be easy for an AI system to identify, accurately describe, compare and recommend. Its products should have complete and consistent information. Its claims should be supported by credible evidence. Its reputation should extend beyond its own channels. And its positioning should be sufficiently clear that an AI can understand where it belongs in a consumer’s consideration set.
The shift is already moving beyond discovery into commerce. Google says its Shopping Graph now contains more than 50 billion product listings, with more than two billion refreshed every hour, while newer AI experiences allow consumers to move from conversational product discovery towards shopping.
The next generation of brand building, therefore, will not be about choosing between humans and machines.
It will be about building brands that work for both.
Because when an AI agent becomes the gatekeeper between a consumer and a purchase, being famous is no longer enough. The brand has to be the answer.
Save the date: 29 September 2026, Dubai. Communicate AI 2026 — The Age of Abundance. More to come.
