AI Discovery Is Mainstream. Now It Needs a Strategy.

When the BBC runs podcasts on AI discovery, it’s no longer experimental. It’s operational.

AI-powered search isn’t coming. It’s already reshaping how customers find, evaluate and choose brands.

This is no longer a trend to monitor. It’s a structural shift to plan for.

Search Has Changed — Permanently

For 20 years, visibility followed a predictable model:

• Optimise for keywords
• Rank on page one
• Capture clicks
• Convert traffic

That model is breaking.

Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude now compress the journey. Users ask a question and receive a synthesised answer, often without clicking through.

The battleground is no longer the search results page, it’s the generated answer.

You’re absent if your brand isn’t cited or referenced.

From SEO to GEO

SEO optimised for position.

GEO, AI Search, AEO, LLM Discovery (choose your acronym) optimises for inclusion.

The strategic question has changed:

Not “Are we ranking?”

But “Are we part of the answer?”

That requires four shifts.

1. Audit AI Visibility

You can’t manage what you can’t see.

Brands need to understand:

• Which priority queries trigger AI answers
• Where clicks are being displaced
• Whether they are cited, ignored or misrepresented

AI answer share should now sit alongside rankings and traffic as a core KPI.

2. Optimise for Citation

Generative engines prioritise content that is:

• Structured and clearly chunked
• Credible and evidence-backed
• Formatted for extraction (lists, tables, summaries)
• Distributed across trusted sources

Keyword padding won’t win. Citable clarity will.

3. Fix the Technical Foundations

AI systems can’t cite what they can’t parse or trust.

That means:

• Structured data and schema
• Clean Knowledge Graph signals
• Clear authorship and entity authority
• Accessible, well-organised content

AI visibility is now partially a technical discipline.

4. Measure the Right Things

Traditional metrics are lagging indicators.

Forward-looking brands are tracking:

• Share of AI prompts citing their brand
• AI citation quality
• Visibility within generated answers
• AI-driven interactions reaching owned channels

This isn’t a reporting tweak.

It’s a redefinition of visibility.

This Is a Board-Level Issue

When AI discovery hits mainstream media, it stops being a search-team topic.

It becomes a brand, media and performance issue.

In recent audits, we’ve seen double-digit visibility drops — not from competitors, but from AI interception of priority queries. Much of it was recoverable with structured intervention.

The risk is real and so is the opportunity.

The Strategic Question

Every leadership team should now ask:

• Are we part of the generated answer?
• Where are we losing visibility to AI?
• What is our structured plan to recover and grow?

AI discovery doesn’t need panic but it does need a strategy and a roadmap.

The brands that treat this as a structural shift will shape how they’re discovered and trusted.

The rest will slowly disappear from view.


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