For years, the search playbook centered on one question: How do we make our website relevant enough for Google to find it? SEO answered with keywords, backlinks, content, and technical signals designed to earn a place in the search results.
AI search introduced a new question: How do we make our brand easy for AI to find, understand, and cite? AEO, (Answer Engine Optimization) emerged to help brands do exactly that, making information clear, consistent, and authoritative enough to earn a place in the answer itself.
The rules of search optimization are changing, and the shift has less to do with what AI knows about a brand and more to do with whether consumers appear to trust that brand.
AEO is no longer just about giving an LLM enough information to find and surface a brand. Brands also need credible expertise worth citing, backed by positive consumer sentiment that signals trust. As AI plays a bigger role in product discovery, reviews, social conversations, and community perspectives can increasingly make the difference between a brand that gets surfaced and one that gets cited and recommended.
For marketers, this expands AEO well beyond the traditional boundaries of search. As the race for visibility evolves, earning visibility in this next phase requires a broader look at the brand, the consumer, and the signals that connect them. Here’s what brands need to navigate carefully, and where the biggest opportunities lie:
A Cautionary Tale in the Race for AI Visibility
As AI search increasingly cites platforms like Reddit, moderators are beginning to flag promotional posts written to resemble genuine user conversations in an effort to influence what tools like ChatGPT and Google surface in their answers. The risk is significant: research from Cornell found that manipulated content as short as 13 words could alter AI-generated responses, potentially allowing manufactured recommendations to be interpreted as genuine consumer sentiment.
These findings reveal a potential new risk within AEO. As brands optimize what AI knows about them, some may also try to influence how AI interprets consumer sentiment. For marketers, the distinction between amplifying genuine consumer advocacy and manufacturing its appearance will become increasingly important.
Build a Brand People Want to Talk About
The bigger opportunity for brands is not influencing the recommendation. It is giving consumers a reason to make the recommendation themselves.
That matters because brands increasingly do not control all the sources shaping AI answers. According to McKinsey, brand-owned websites account for just 5–10% of the sources referenced by AI search, with the rest coming from a broader ecosystem that includes publishers, affiliates, user-generated content, and other third parties.
That puts brand building and community at the center of the AEO conversation. Strong customer experiences and recognizable brand identities give consumers reasons to recommend a brand. Engaging social content and authentic community participation keep those conversations going across the places AI increasingly looks for answers.
The goal is not to get consumers to create content for an algorithm. It is to build enough affinity that they want to talk about the brand on their own.
Affinity requires investment beyond search. Brands should turn towards creating customer experiences worth reviewing, social content worth engaging with, and communities people actually want to participate in. As AI discovery grows, those everyday brand interactions increasingly influence which brands make it into the conversation.
Consistency Is Critical to AI Visibility
Building trust among consumers is only one piece of the AEO puzzle. Brands also need to make sure their identity is clear and consistent wherever AI encounters them.
That starts with up-to-date information across websites, product pages, social channels, earned media, and other digital touchpoints. It also means speaking the same language consumers do. Retail Brew notes that Urban Outfitters, for example, discovered that some of its jeans were not appearing as frequently in AI searches because its product descriptions used “denim” without explicitly mentioning “jeans.”
The example is simple, but the takeaway is bigger. As AI pulls information from more places, consistency helps connect the dots between what a brand says, how consumers talk about it, and what ultimately surfaces in AI search.
AEO should not mean creating a separate identity for AI. It should make an existing brand presence clearer and easier to understand wherever AI encounters it.
Build Real Trust, Then Help AI Recognize It
Search optimization has entered a new phase in which relevance can be engineered, information can be structured, and even trust can be manipulated.
But being recommended only matters if there is something real behind the recommendation. For retailers and marketers, the priority should be building a brand consumers genuinely choose to talk about and recommend, then maintaining a clear, consistent presence that allows search platforms to recognize that credibility.
Search will continue to evolve, but the brands best positioned to evolve with it will be those consumers already have a reason to trust and that AI has a clear reason to recommend.
