Look Ma, I’m a Visibility Engineer!
Image: Unsplash
First it was ‘AI Engine Optimisation’, then came ‘Generative Engine Optimisation’ (GEO), and now the marketing world is abuzz with ‘Answer Engine Optimisation’ (AEO) and PR professionals have become ‘Visibility Engineers’. But if you wade through the reams written on the subject, it seems there’s a lot more noise about what shifting search behaviours mean than about how to make sure potential customers aren’t missing your brand in their search for solutions.
Of course, it’s always much easier to speculate on the future than take steps to shape it, so when I was writing this blog, I thought I’d set out to help readers think about how they might do the latter.
AI and search: the bits that matter
For those who haven’t already had it up to the gills with all things AI and search, I’ll begin with a brief summary of how search has changed and why you should care:
Search engines and SEO are far from dead: Back in late 2024, Gartner famously predicted a 25% drop in search engine volume by 2026. 2026 may be here, but that 25% drop is not. In fact, back in August 2025, Google reported that overall organic click volume was holding steady, and according to a recent analysis by Graphite and Similarweb of organic traffic from Google to 40,000 of the largest sites in the US, search traffic is down 2.5% year on year.
People believe AI overviews, and zero-click searches are here: One of the biggest changes in the world of search has undoubtedly been the rise of the AI Overview and the growth of the ‘zero-click search’. Every week the number of searches that yields an AI overview increases. Similarly, the number of search queries answered on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), or by an AI overview without a single click, is also on the rise.
Buyers are already using LLMs and AI agents to find, compare and evaluate products and services: In addition to the influence that AI overviews undoubtedly have, LLMs such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude are increasingly being used as research and comparison tools by searchers. (Aside: many are already using proprietary LLMs for this.) Indeed, according to Forrester, 94% of buyers report now using these kinds of tools in the buying process. And when SAP measured the impact of LLMs on search traffic to its website, they found that even though LLM-referred visitors remained a small slice of their total search traffic, that slice grew by 168% in a year and those visitors were both more engaged and more likely to convert. In short, even though referrals from AI search platforms are still in the very low single digits, it matters.
Authority is still everything: Throughout 2025 I noticed clients cropping up in more and more AI overviews and LLM answers. The sources linked were invariably one of three things - commentary in a trade media feature, news coverage resulting from a press release, or a long-form post on the client’s own blog. What all of these have in common is that they’re informative instead of promotional. They’re credible, trusted by the reader, and they have authority.
The TL;DR version? Search is evolving. People are still using search engines, but they’re using AI search too. More importantly, when they’re referred by an AI search platform they’re more likely to buy. For the first time in two decades, we’re operating in a multi-platform discovery ecosystem, but being found is still dependent on building authority.
How do you build authority?
Understand what ‘authority’ is
When I first segued into the world of content, Google’s Panda update was the hot topic in online copywriting and SEO courses, and Google’s EEAT (Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) guidelines made me enormously excited for the future of content marketing, PR and communications. That was 2012. Plus ça change.
If you dig into best practice, authority building is still all about purposeful, user-focused content. Search engines reward what Google still calls “helpful, reliable, people-first content”. Indeed, this is also why search engines penalise content that is created to manipulate search rankings.
Stick to good content hygiene practices
The good news is that if you’ve been doing this all along, a big part of adapting to the AI search era is keeping to the good content hygiene practices you already have in place. If not, it’s time to get back to ensuring all of your digital content assets — from your website and blog to your social media profiles — are accurate, relevant, current and compelling. In practice, this means:
Plan and stick to regular content audits: Get rid of unnecessary content, fix broken links, keep facts and figures up to date, and reevaluate low-performing content.
Group and evaluate your content using the four Rs: Classify your content assets according to whether they should remain as is, or whether they need to be reviewed, repurposed or removed. If they’re low-performing but important, you need to find out why.
Optimise for current user journeys: Your website needs to work for the journey your web users take through your site today (and evolve for the one they’ll be taking in six months), not back when it was built.
Create informative, credible content
When it comes to what your content should look like, creating authoritative content is very much the bread and butter of B2B communications: we demonstrate expertise and draw on experience to build trust. Three of the most effective ways to do this are:
Demonstrate thought leadership: Develop informative content that positions your subject matter experts as the authoritative voices they are (or should be), both on your website and in the media.
Publish research: Whether quantitative or qualitative, robust and reliable original research is a valuable asset that is widely cited in both AI and conventional search results.
Build useful, human-centred content on the topics you want to be known for: This might be application-led ‘how to’ content, trend round-ups for specific market segments, or the addition to FAQ pages populated by real customer questions.
What has changed in the AI search era?
While your EEAT strategy is still essential, there is more you can do to enrich your content for AI-driven search. Some of this is behind-the-scenes work on structured data to help LLMs more easily ingest your content, but a great deal is also about the content creation itself:
Create with citation in mind: Unstructured text demands more processing, so minimise ingestion friction by structuring your text to increase the likelihood of snippets being selected. Use clear and functional headings, write precisely and concisely, avoid overly complex paragraphs, and use lists and tables where appropriate.
Write as you’d speak to your audience: LLMs are often responding to conversationally worded questions, and so are seeking snippets that will match the register of that tone. If your ‘introduction to …’ page is full of technical jargon and formal language, it’s not likely to be served to audiences seeking introductory content early on their search journey. Keep your language natural and mirror how your users ask questions in any Q&A style content.
Use channels together: If you write once on a topic, pop that on your website and call it a day, you’re missing out on a lot of potential visibility. Every story you tell needs to be told across as many of your channels as are relevant to the audiences you want to reach, and possibly more than once, but because LLMs steer away from repetition, you need to ensure that the story isn’t identical but instead can stand alone on every platform.
Earn performance recognition: From a brand communications point of view, earned media coverage has always been valuable, but in the AI-driven search era it has become even more important because many AI systems give more weight to established media sources than brand websites.
Why is earned media important?
What is different about the AI search era, and why so much of the PR industry is nodding sagely, is that search is now, finally conferring digital kudos to the brand recognition, trust building and reputation enhancing benefits of media coverage, or ‘earned media’. (Karis mentioned this in our last blog, and I also discussed it in this article about PR for Print Monthly last year.)
Business leaders, communications professionals and many in the marketing world already know how critical good PR is to business success. Bill Gates is widely quoted as having said he’d spend his last dollar on public relations, but as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, that quote is largely apocryphal and so the one I tend to fall back on is Richard Branson’s: “A good PR story is infinitely more effective than a front-page ad.” Either way, if you’re not shaping the way your story is told, someone else will tell it, or worse, now it won’t get told at all.
Being shown as a thought leader or a problem solver in earned media sources such as trade publications, industry blogs or trade association websites has always influenced brand perception and trust among audiences. Now LLMs have become one of those audiences. And as far as AI overviews and LLM-based searches are concerned, the absence of a story that reinforces your brand’s reputation and messaging means your brand doesn’t have sufficient authority to make it worth referencing.
How do you engineer visibility?
Those of us who work with PESO (Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned) or hub-and-spoke content models in mind are probably feeling a little less pessimistic about AI’s impacts than some in other industries. For the time being (and I fully appreciate this is evolving as I type), it seems brands that take best practice, human-centric approaches to content and communications are going to be the winners in this new era.
One of the most interesting things about discussions of AI-driven search is the language shift. When I first waded into the world of content marketing, the phrases you’d hear most often when talking about discovery, comparison and decisions were ‘marketing journey’ and ‘marketing touchpoints’. Now, discussions centre around the ‘search journey’ that audiences take, which seems to signal that we’re finally moving into a phase of marketing communications in which audience-centricity is an essential part of strategy, not just a buzzword.
Engineering visibility isn’t just about your brand being found, it’s about being selected when it is. Achieving that means demonstrating expertise and experience in relatable, real-world ways to be cited as a trusted authority. It also demands content that enhances credibility and integrates across platforms to compound both your narrative and your returns. And finally, it calls for curiosity about where the audience’s knowledge gaps are, and then responding to that.
Sounds easy, right? If not, please connect with us on LinkedIn or pop us an email. As you can tell (if you’ve read this far), we LOVE to talk about how communications is evolving and how brands can navigate that.
