Marketing in the Age of Chaos: Why AI Search Is Changing Everything You Thought You Knew
Marketing has never been simple. But lately? It's chaos.
The rules are changing. The platforms are changing. And what worked in the past—even a year ago—isn't necessarily going to work now.
Nowhere is this more true than in search. Old-school SEO is not dead, but it is no longer the unchallenged king of discovery. AI is coming for it, and quickly.
It's estimated that up to a quarter of all online searches will be done via AI in the coming year or two. Whether that number is higher or lower, one thing is for sure: search is shifting in ways most brands aren't prepared for.
So what does that mean for marketing leaders?
AI Search Isn't Just a Smarter Google — It's Rewriting all the Rules
AI doesn't serve up blue links. It serves up answers.
And answers differ depending on who's doing the asking.
AI-driven search is dynamic, contextual, and occasionally unpredictable. It tailors its responses to the user and how a question is asked.
Which means a similar query from two different individuals can lead to vastly different representations of your brand.
Testing how your brand shows up in AI search is no longer a one-and-done test.
It's something that should be tested through the lens of various types of customers. Test prompts from the perspective of your target customer. Then test as a job candidate, a competitor, an investor. New tools and startups, like Gumshoe AI, are beginning to enter the market to support this process because it is a complex challenge.
Your Website Isn't the Center of your Universe Anymore
AI search doesn't start (or stop) with your website.
New models are drawing information from everywhere:
Reddit forums
YouTube video captions
Amazon reviews
Github
Third-party blogs
News sites
Niche forums
– you name it.
And in most cases, these off-site sources are being given more weight than your carefully crafted website content.
If your brand has:
Merged or undergone a rebrand
Sunset products or changed lines of service
Unmaintained microsites lingering out there
Outdated product pages or FAQs
…there's a good chance AI is pulling (and citing) old information. It's not just a matter of being present. It's about being structured and relevant.
To show up the right way in AI-powered answers:
Use high-intent keywords that reflect real user questions, but avoid keyword stuffing.
Track engagement, not just traffic. AI search prefers stickiness: time on page, bounce rate, and content clarity.
Measure what matters today. Traditional rank tracking is becoming obsolete. Measure instead:
Share of voice (SOV)
Content engagement metrics
Branded search volume
Traffic from AI-driven search engines
AI Can Misrepresent You — Or Mislead Entirely
Imagine this: a customer inquires with an AI tool (be it ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or others) about which product is best suited to solve their problem. It retrieves a 2019 Reddit discussion in which someone had a bad experience with your brand — and serves up that as the authoritative answer.
A job applicant searches for your Glassdoor reviews, but AI scrapes outdated ones from before a major culture shift — misrepresenting your current employer brand.
A news article you were mentioned in once — where your brand was incorrectly associated with a lawsuit or scandal — gets picked up as a key reference in AI responses.
AI tools summarize your pricing incorrectly, quoting a promotional offer that’s long expired. Customers come in expecting one thing, only to find another.
These aren't hypotheticals. They're actual risks to your brand safety.
This is especially important for companies who have undergone shifts in:
Brand positioning
Product availability
Ownership or leadership
Customer experience reputation
When AIs hallucinate — or simply draw the wrong narrative — your brand gets hurt.
The Lines Between PR, Content, and Reputation are Blurring
As customers adopt AI search, reputation management will carry across all platforms where AI is listening and drawing context. Thought leadership, customer reviews, and off-site content strategy now play a role in how AI perceives and defines your brand.
Monitoring and optimizing these ecosystems is just as important as website SEO.
Do You Know How AI Actually Sees You?
Let's run a quick diagnostic exercise:
Create some buyer personas.
Catalog questions they'd ask while researching or considering a purchase.
Plug those into several AI tools.
See the responses.
And then, ask yourself:
What's being mentioned?
What are the competitor names that come up?
Is your message consistent?
Is anything factually incorrect, outdated, or irrelevant?
You're doing an AI brand audit. And what you'll find could surprise you.
From there, you can start to identify:
Content gaps to fill
Misinformation to correct
Outdated material to update
Areas where your brand voice can be stronger or more prominent
Content Freshness = Visibility
Most AI models place a major emphasis on content that has been published or updated in the past 90 days. So publishing new content — and republishing past content — is crucial to discoverability.
Refresh your most valuable evergreen content. Update the statistics, make the examples fresh, tighten up the writing. Then republish.
Designing for People and Machines
Should we create websites for humans… or for AI?
The answer, at least for now, is both.
You require content that's simple to read and helpful to humans — but also machine-scannable and digestible.
Here's how you can find middle ground:
Lead with the answer. Don't make readers wade through long intros.
Use headers and bullet points to organize big ideas.
Turn real user questions into FAQs.
Summarize clearly. Create short recaps of each section for AI tools to latch onto.
Add captions and transcripts to your videos.
Use schema markup to make content machine-readable.
If you’re not sure where to start, pretend you’re writing for a robot that’s tasked with summarizing your content for someone in a hurry — because that’s exactly what’s happening.
The Future Is Unclear — But Action Is Still Required
Here’s what we don’t know:
We don't know how soon consumers will look to AI-powered search for purchase decisions.
We don't know how much of the web will soon be optimized more for AI agents than humans.
We don't know how many of these tools will become dominant — or how often their algorithms will change.
But we do know this: This shift isn't going away.
Brands that wait for it to "settle" will already be behind.
So — how is your brand showing up in AI-driven search?
See anything strange or unexpected? Wonder how to audit and optimize your content for this new world? Connect with us! We’re exploring this actively and would love to hear what you’re seeing, too.