News in the Channel - issue #41

AI VISIBILITY

understandable some brands feel they must focus on achieving this marker. Short-term tactics we’re seeing include publishing high volumes of thin, keyword-heavy content designed to match AI queries, creating generic ‘expert commentary’ pages with no authorship or depth, chasing backlinks in publications regardless of editorial credibility or relevance and optimising content structure for machines at the expense of clarity for human readers. These aren’t new mistakes; they’re like SEO shortcuts we used to see. But AI systems don’t just index content, they interpret and summarise it. Weak or repetitive material dilutes how a brand is represented, so the right brand strategy becomes even more important. Consistency matters more than ever Brands that perform consistently well in AI-generated results tend have clear, coherent and repeated positioning across every channel. AI systems interpret a brand from multiple sources, so if messaging varies too much, the system merges conflicting signals, resulting in diluted or inaccurate representation. Brands with a good content strategy, clear SEO, consistent messaging and PR coverage will be more accurately represented in AI systems and more resilient in the event of change.

What good AI visibility looks like Strong AI visibility in practice looks like strong marketing done properly. It means positioning a brand in a way that is specific enough to be understood and consistent enough to be repeated. Google recently published its own AI visibility checker within Search Console, and its advice is to focus on the same strategies they recommend for SEO. Keep publishing consistently insightful content, prioritising readability and structuring web content to effectively guide users where they want to go. If your ideal customer finds it useful, there’s a good chance an AI will see it as useful too. If brands asking, ‘how do we rank in AI?’ it’s often the wrong question. What they should ask is ‘is our brand clearly understood, consistently communicated and credible enough to surface accurately?’ If the answer is yes, then AI visibility will be a lot less hard work. If the answer is no, then no amount of AI-specific optimisation will fix it. As more people switch to using AI search – Google say that 68% of searches now end without a site being clicked on – if you don’t adapt, you run the risk of being left behind. The CNN/Perplexity case is one indication among many that AI search is still finding its footing. But the core principles on getting found online still apply. Those have always been the foundations of good marketing and remain so. n

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Brands with a good content strategy, clear

SEO, consistent messaging and PR coverage will be more accurately represented in AI systems and more resilient in the event of change.

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