How is AI affecting My Brand’s Search Results?

A guide to navigating Answer Engine Optimization

Overview

Your brand is no longer competing just in ranking of search result lists. It is now competing in AI-generated answers to prompts or questions. Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are increasingly where people turn for answers — not just links. This shift is forcing marketers to enhance how their brand is found and presented online.

Introduction

Let’s start with some context first. Artificial Intelligence is transforming search, much like almost every other aspect of our lives. The rapid adoption of ChatGPT and others for searching or shopping the web indicates a shifting landscape in user behavior and preferences.

Search Volume: As of April 2025, ChatGPT alone processed over 1 billion searches per week, reflecting its growing prominence in the search domain.⁽¹⁾

AI’s evolution from a conversational aid or virtual helper to a significant player in the search arena highlights the growing trend of integrating AI into everyday information retrieval tasks. A helpful way to think about this growing dynamic is offered by Karsten Madsen at Morningscore who argues “AI doesn’t eat the (search) market – it expands it”.⁽²⁾

For marketers the first key realization is the arena is expanding and there will be new tools and methods for those looking to gain traction. While Google remains far and away dominant in the industry, processing 373 times more searches than ChatGPT, nearly half (47%) of its search results now feature AI overviews to better personalize and contextualize results.

It is important to note that human behavior relative to search is shifting with our younger users (Gen Z demo 16-26) who seek information online increasingly using social, image search and AI platforms.

Note: total n=15,469: Gen Z n=2,072  
Source: GWI. “2024 Global Media Landscape Report”, March 26, 2024

Observations

So AI is expanding the search domain and younger users are looking for information differently. In this context, AI is both an enhancer to traditional search results as well as a source for nuanced answers, with new users navigating in new ways.

Another key observation is that what specifically you are searching for as a user or (what you are offering as a marketeer) affects how much of a role AI plays. The prevalence of AI overviews can vary significantly depending on the type of query to initiate:

74% of Problem-Solving Queries: As noted above, AI overviews are triggered much more frequently for queries seeking to solve problems or answer questions.
58.7% of Informational Queries: AI overviews are more likely to appear for informational queries, designed to provide knowledge or understanding about a topic.
19.4% of Commercial Intent Queries: AI overviews are less frequent for commercial queries, which indicate an intent to purchase or find a product or service. ⁽³⁾

So, to borrow an ancient metaphor, AI in search becomes more used and useful when you are seeking an answer from a concierge versus finding a business listed in the yellow pages. For a marketeer who relies on sites being found and uses search results to drive traffic and leads for your business, how does this context inform how you can optimize for answer engines? This chart from EMarketer gives us a glimpse of how their respondents are bolstering efforts currently.⁽⁴⁾

Source: Netcore, “State of Ecommerce and Retail Marketing 2024” conducted by Dynata, May 8, 2024

A Guide to Optimization

The first 5 responses in the chart above factor squarely into an AEO strategy and action plan. Below are 5 key questions and details that will get you started with enhancing your Brand’s Search results factoring AI – or your guide to AEO.

1. How is your data being leveraged by AI?

All data is not treated equally. That’s because the Large Language Models that power these Answer Engines rely on a finite corpus of data that they were trained on. If it wasn’t available at the training data cutoff, it is as if it hasn’t happened yet. Models are being updated on a more frequent basis but 6-12 months can still elapse between updates. However, certain LLMs like Bing, Perplexity and Gemini are using live retrieval to browse the web to retrieve information in near real-time. So, while it may look like the chat bot is providing a sophisticated reasoned response, when it is asked about current events it is really behaving like a search engine.

2. Fundamentals matter

Luckily, many practices that helped your content to be found by search engines still applies to answer engines. They love structured data. Clear page titles, section headings, taxonomy and hierarchy matter. After all, bots are bots and only see the structures we can help them see in our content. However, they can be blind to certain ways of presenting content that was increasingly popular.

3. Is your site structured and coded to accommodate AI crawlers?

Today’s answer engines can’t render javascript and they don’t see a page that is served by all those trendy headless CMS that were popular the last few years. We suspect this limitation won’t persist but currently, if you don’t provide structured HTML for your page, the content isn’t there for the AI crawlers. Understanding how your site is coded and yoru content management is structured is a crucial step to address.

4. What type of content are you looking to ensure is found by AI crawlers?

As stated above, content that is problem-solving, informational or commercial in nature will require distinct methods of staging. You will need to shape content in ways that answer engines love. And what they love is quotable, citable comparisons, quantifiable results, questions and answers–all the detail you might expect to get as an answer if you asked a knowledgeable friend. This means you need an appropriate content strategy and the ability to create the right content in the right places of your site.

Like with SEO, you’ll want to avoid ruining the reading experience of your site for humans, so these AEO enhancements will need to be deftly handled.

5. Has AEO got you paralyzed with how to proceed?

If unsure how to get started, let’s get in touch and explore a simple and effective site audit as a starting point. This will identify gaps and areas of opportunities as well as provide you with a benchmark for performance today versus your peers or competitors.

Summary

AI is ushering a dynamic expansion and adding a nuanced capability to the information we seek and procure. For marketers this is a prime opportunity to gain a foothold for your brand versus your competitors. Curious? Let’s connect.