AI search has changed the way consumers move through the digital space, especially in the early stages of the customer journey.
Where users once engaged with the traditional ten blue links on Google Search, they are now relying more and more on generative platforms like Google’s AI Overviews (AIO), ChatGPT, and Perplexity to perform research. Often, they don’t even click through to brand websites. This shift toward zero-click search behavior significantly changes the discovery process and ultimately impacts consumer decision-making and purchasing.
As a result, brands shouldn’t rely solely on traditional SEO or site-based engagement metrics. They must adopt new frameworks for measuring visibility and narrative control within AI-generated experiences to maintain influence and competitive advantage long before a site visit or conversion occurs.
It’s essential to understand your brand’s presence in these emerging channels to inform strategies that maintain customer connection, build brand trust, and expand market share in an increasingly fragmented digital environment.
The Metrics That Matter
Brand success hinges increasingly less on clicks and conversions and more on how, where, and whether your brand appears within AI-generated compositions. With generative search experiences redefining consumer behavior, brand visibility and sentiment in these environments play a decisive role in driving downstream engagement and conversion.
To remain competitive, brands must track visibility within generative search ecosystems through the key performance indicators that go beyond traditional SEO metrics. These include:
Total brand mentions: At the highest level, across the tracked AI platforms, how many or what share of mentions is your brand garnering in AI-generated responses?
Brand impressions: The simplest way to understand visibility. How many views is your brand getting in AI-generated responses?
Brand sentiment: A qualitative measure. Is the tone and content being generated about your brand positive, negative, or neutral? What kind of perception does it create?
AI citations and source control: Are the AI platforms that provide sources for answers selecting your brand’s URLs and domain for inclusion? How often and is it consistent?
AI Overviews frequency: In Google Search, do your brand and industry keywords trigger an AI Overviews box and are you included in it?
Direct traffic: High brand visibility and positive sentiment in AI tools lead to direct brand website traffic and clicks. Are your brand URLs getting more and more qualified visitors?
Branded searches: Is your brand garnering more organic branded searches, another result of high brand visibility and positive sentiment in AI tools?
The Stakes of Absence and Negativity in Generative AI Tools
There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
Oscar Wilde
The same is true in AI search, only the talking about should be positive.
The risks of absence are similar to those of being absent from traditional marketing channels — if you lose eyes, someone else fills the gap. In the AI context, this gap has the added risk that AI misunderstands your brand, using non-controlled, user-generated sources like Reddit and Quora or outdated content.
Take a major brand like Ticketmaster as an example. At Terakeet, we recently studied their performance in generative AI (GenAI) and found that Ticketmaster had 22% negative sentiment within AI-generated answers for important branded queries. This is likely due to a high presence of negative Reddit threads and competitor dominance in the AI models. It reveals the strategic opportunity for Ticketmaster to inject more control over its branded narrative by optimizing content around branded queries.
Without a proactive generative engine optimization (GEO) strategy, brands risk their narrative, lose early-stage influence opportunities, and face diminished trust.
Brands Can Maximize AI Visibility — Here’s How
Building trust through AI tools is a matter of understanding your AI landscape, building owned assets, and iterating on your strategy. At a high level, here’s how we recommend brands proceed:
Build AI-friendly content: Audit, update, and create content that’s accurate, current, valuable to consumers, and easily accessible to the LLMs that power popular AI platforms.
Focus on user intent and clusters: Prioritize the intent-driven content that consumers want in a content cluster structure. The key is creating what offers value in a networked way, avoiding isolated, non-strategic pages.
Become an authority: AI tools tend to cite or include content that offers unique insights. Lean into your brand’s particular expertise and internal resources to offer proprietary information, expert commentary, and data-based assets. These are authority signals that impact both organic and AI search.
Measure results: Monitor the impact of your content focus, including AI Overviews placements, branded query growth trends, and all of the other metrics above.
This is a starting point for a GEO strategy that can achieve AI placements, citations, and encourage visibility.
Clicks Aren’t Everything
The new reality is that generative AI platforms are the first and most important touchpoints in the customer journey. As primary discovery touchpoints, these platforms are rapidly displacing traditional search as the consumer’s first source of truth.
All indicators point to accelerated adoption and innovation in this space — and with it, a foundational shift in how brand visibility is earned and measured.
In an AI-first marketing landscape, being seen, talked about, and trusted is everything. If your brand isn’t seen, referenced, or trusted at the point of discovery, it may never be considered by consumers at all.
©2025 DK New Media, LLC, All rights reserved | Disclosure
Originally Published on Martech Zone: Why Brands Must Build Influence Early in The AI Era