Photo by mostafa meraji on Unsplash
Brands will continue to fight for visibility in 2026, the “new metric” in the market of AI summaries and Google AI mode.
The launch of Google AI mode last year, an AI-first search interface, saw traditional blue links and clicks replaced by a conversational search experience.
To marketers, the message was clear: if your brand isn’t suggested in these summaries, you’re effectively invisible in the zero-click market.
Marketers saw an aligned change in query behaviours, moving from keywords toward long-form, conversational searches.
There was a shift from search engine optimisation (SEO) to generative engine optimisation (GEO) to be favoured by the new AI suggestions.
“Visibility within LLMs is not guaranteed by traditional SEO tactics,” managing director of digital solutions at Mindshare, Daniel Benton, told AdNews.
“AI models remix branded content with third-party sources, often bypassing brands’ owned websites entirely. If your brand isn’t surfaced in AI-generated answers, you risk being invisible at the critical point of discovery.”
Establishing and sustaining trust is more important than ever.
“The future of search is not just about ten blue links…It’s about being the brand that AI trusts enough to recommend,” Benton said.
AI has also evolved from a mere tool in how customers discover and buy, to a long-term shopping partner that’s memorised their identity. In 2026, this is where context will matter most for brands and publishers.
AI follows users across their many devices and digital contexts.
Philip Hwang, transformation director at Leo Burnett Australia, refers to the LifeOS concept as a continuity of self, the ability for AI to learn and influence buyers’ decisions every step of the way.
“Because this is what AI ultimately wants to be: your LifeOS, the layer through which you see and interpret the world,” Hwang told AdNews.
“Not just a cross-platform experience, but a continuity of self, carried by an agent that moves with you, remembers for you, and increasingly thinks ahead of you.
“People won’t move through the customer journey alone anymore. AI is riding shotgun, and this changes our marketing rules instantly.
"Brand stickiness won’t come from messaging or mere data anymore, but from AI’s memory of you and its memory of a bran, carried across every AI layer you use."
For brands, a solid creative campaign and media spend, no longer guarantee visibility. AI values proof over promise through the wide, data-rich context of customer reviews and Reddit complaints.
“That’s because AI doesn’t buy the story, the clever slogans and campaigns: it buys the proof,” Hwang said.
“It pieces your brand together not only from “what you say,” but from the aggregate of “what they say”: the innumerable product reviews, service experiences, forum rants, and third-party comparisons that make up the long tail “truth” of a brand.
“Knowing the category entry point is now table stakes. Proving you can actually satisfy is the new job.
“If AI can’t verify your claim in aggregate data, you’re not getting matched to a buyers’ context. It’s flipping and closing the say-do gap. Just not what consumers say versus what they do, but what brands say versus what they actually deliver.”
AI has “rewritten” retail discovery with Australians increasingly turning to AI agents to inform their buying decisions. Some marketers have already reported early signs of growth from AI Mode.
They report increased brand visibility earlier on in the discovery process through AI recommendations. This has led to quicker buying habits.
This year will bring the acceleration of Agentic commerce, where autonomous agents not only research and compare products but negotiate and complete purchases.
“To seize an agentic commerce advantage, marketers and agencies need to act swiftly and strategically,” Joshua Lee, chief digital and solutions officer at Zenith Australia, told AdNews.
“Success requires building brands that consumers want their agents to choose, by optimising product metadata for AI, continuously auditing brand visibility, and creating campaigns that win at both the data and demand generation level.”
In 2025, the number of weekly ChatGPT users rose to 800 million, more than 30 times the nation’s population, according to Vivian Luo, director of marketing, APAC at Commerce.
And by mid 2025, close to half of Australians (48%), used AI assistants for online shopping searches and 61% said they trust AI for product recommendations, according to research by PayPal.
Navigating the new playing field means prioritising data over design. How can digital strategy and tech stacks evolve ensure AI systems understand, and recommend a brand.
“Heading into 2026, the real opportunity lies in becoming searchable in an AI-driven world,” Luo said.
“That requires clean, structured and context-rich product data, supported by flexible technology that can evolve as AI agents emerge and mature.
“Discovery is no longer about how a website looks, it’s about how well your data can be understood and trusted by machines. The brands that prioritise data quality and modern infrastructure will be the ones shoppers find first.”
While Paul Hewett, chief executive officer at In Marketing We Trust, warns of a false certainty of security from data gathered by AI visibility tools.
These measurement tools lack analysis on the back and forth of users comparing different brands and making a decision. These tools deliver on precision not accuracy, Hewett told AdNews.
“These tools are measuring something, it's just not anything useful,” he said.
“The key thing to consider is that most of these platforms query LLMs (large language models) through APIs (application programming interfaces) rather than the consumer interface.
“The API gives you responses based on training data. The actual product pulls from real-time sources, remembers conversation history and personalises based on context. They're not measuring the same thing.
“But even if someone builds a better tool, there's a more fundamental issue. We've been trying to measure AI search like it's a static channel. Except AI search isn't static, it's a conversation.
“Every answer depends on what came before, how the question was phrased, what the model remembers about that user.”
And earned reputation versus built authority is the new advantage, as search engine optimisation (SEO) is replaced by generative engine optimisation (GEO).
“For any marketer looking to build their skills in this space in 2026, remember - SEO is about authority you build but GEO is about reputation you earn. And sometimes inherit, whether you like it or not,” Hewett said.
“LLMs are a channel now. That’s not a 2026 prediction, it’s a 2025 reality,” he said.
“Marketers need to get to grips with it and there’s genuine urgency to do so. We spent 2025 chasing visibility metrics from tools that can’t reliably measure what they claim to measure.
“In 2026, the focus needs to shift. We need to focus on accuracy over visibility, to fix what LLMs get wrong about your brand rather than obsessing over share of model and accept that part of the customer journey now happens somewhere we can’t see.”
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