Daniel Benton.
In this series, industry leaders share their perspectives on the defining moments of 2025 and the forces shaping the year ahead. Here, Managing Director of Digital Solutions, Mindshare a WPP Media brand, Daniel Benton, writes his thoughts on the impact of Gen AI.
Be sure to check out Adnews' 50-plus page State of the Market report, Forecast 2026, for more outlooks.
Gen AI and large language models (LLMs) are rewriting the entire playbook for search and brand discovery, and visibility is the new battleground, says Mindshare’s Dan Benton.
The search landscape is undergoing its most profound transformation since Google launched two decades ago. Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are not just tweaking the rules of SEO - they’re rewriting the entire playbook for brand discovery. For Australian marketers, this shift is both a challenge and an opportunity. The question is: are we ready?
Visibility Is the New Battleground
AI-powered discovery is no longer a fringe behaviour. Platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity have become the first point of contact for millions of consumers. In Australia, usage of AI search has surged dramatically, with ChatGPT now consistently receiving +100m visits per month – up 100% year-on-year. Unlike traditional search, these interactions are long-form, conversational and highly fragmented. 80% of prompts in any given category are unique. This is the downstream impact of the query length within AI search being more akin to a paragraph (23 words) and the models carrying context forward due to the memory function.
This means visibility within LLMs is not guaranteed by traditional SEO tactics. 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.
The message to the C-Suite is clear: Optimising for AI visibility is not optional. It’s a strategic imperative. Particularly in high consideration categories like finance, automotive, technology and personal care.
This is about more than technical tweaks; it requires organisational alignment. Every team that touches content, from PR to product, needs to understand their respective contribution to AI visibility. It’s a fast-approaching problem, and delaying facing it is dangerous because competitors are already investing in trying to build defensible beach heads in categories.
Why This Matters for Brand Building
In a world where AI models decide what consumers see, brand equity becomes a ranking signal. LLMs interpret not just what you publish, but how others describe you. Sentiment in third-party sources, topical associations and citation frequency all influence recommendations.
This is why brand investment must continue to be at the top of the agenda. Driving positive sentiment, authoritative mentions and consistent messaging across channels will feed the models with favourable data. Think of it as educating the models indirectly, through the ecosystem of content they ingest.
There are five key things brands and marketers need to do in 2026 to ensure they don’t vanish at the point of discovery in this new AI-powered search world.
- Audit Your AI Visibility
Start by understanding how your brand appears in AI responses today. AI visibility audits can reveal which models surface your brand, what topics they use and how you stack up against competitors. These audits also identify gaps in topic association and consumer preference alignment. These are critical insights to inform an effective optimisation strategy.
- Structure content for AI
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the evolution of SEO. It means structuring content for AI overviews, conversational queries and visual search. Use semantic markup, FAQs and authoritative tone for AI summaries. For conversational AI, craft content that answers nuanced, long-tail questions in natural language.
- Prioritise Citations and Context
AI models rely heavily on external validation. Start by understanding the influential domains within your category. Then use this data to inform earned media and digital PR initiatives. This isn’t link-building, it’s influence-building for the AI era.
- Invest in Enterprise Content Orchestration
Success in LLMs starts with large-scale, high-quality, thematically rich content. This isn’t about creating pages one by one; it’s about orchestrating content production and distribution so that every asset reinforces your brand narrative across multiple touchpoints.
- Measure What Matters
Traditional metrics like click-through rate won’t tell you how you’re performing in AI search. New KPIs - such as share of mentions, share of citations and sentiment analysis - are essential for tracking visibility and influence within AI models.
The Road Ahead
AI is moving from reactive Q&A to proactive assistance. Soon, agentic search will recommend products based on context, climate and past behaviour. The recent launch of Open AI’s Atlas browser signals where product discovery and purchase are heading. For marketers, this means the battleground for attention has expanded and now includes a new channel mediated by increasingly intelligent AI models.
The future of search is not just about ten blue links like it was in the early days of search. It’s about being the brand that AI trusts enough to recommend. That trust is earned through relevance, authority and consistency, delivered at scale.
The time to act is now. Because in the age of AI discovery, invisibility is not an option.
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