AI isn’t simply changing how consumers search. It is beginning to influence which brands become part of the conversation in the first place. Every recommendation made by an AI platform reflects a series of choices.
When consumers ask AI to compare smartphones, recommend a financial service, explain skincare ingredients, or shortlist travel destinations, the response isn’t generated from a single webpage. AI evaluates information from multiple sources before deciding which brands deserve to be mentioned.
That seemingly invisible process is creating a new layer of competition.
Research from Capgemini found that 58% of consumers have already replaced traditional search engines with generative AI for product or service recommendations. As conversational AI becomes a more common starting point for discovery, marketers face a new strategic challenge: understanding how AI decides which brands become part of the conversation and which are left out.
While the rules are still emerging, MMA’s Gen AI Search Performance (GASP) initiative offers one of the earliest evidence bases for understanding how AI evaluates brand visibility and authority.
More importantly, it reveals that the future of discoverability may depend less on being found and more on being referenced.
Brand Discovery Is Entering a New Consumer Journey
The significance of AI-powered discovery lies less in the technology itself and more in how quickly consumer behaviour is adapting around it.
According to IBM’s Institute for Business Value, developed in collaboration with the National Retail Federation, 45% of consumers already use AI during their shopping journey. They rely on AI to research products (41%), interpret reviews (33%), and find deals (31%), even though 72% still complete purchases in physical stores.
The digital journey is evolving just as rapidly. According to Previsible’s AI Traffic Report, AI-sourced website traffic surged by 527% year over year between early 2025 and early 2026, signalling that conversational AI is becoming a meaningful discovery channel rather than a niche experiment.
Together, these trends suggest that AI is becoming an intermediary between consumers and brands. Increasingly, consumers are asking AI to interpret information, compare alternatives, and narrow their choices before they visit a website, retailer, or marketplace.
That changes the question marketers need to answer.
It is no longer simply Can consumers find our brand?
It is increasingly Will AI choose to recommend it?
What GASP Data Is Beginning to Reveal
Much of the discussion around AI visibility focuses on how marketers should optimise for AI.
GASP approaches the challenge from a different direction.
Instead of asking what marketers should do, it examines how AI is already behaving. Its early findings reveal several emerging patterns.
One participating brand improved from 27th position into the top ten AI-generated recommendations. Another saw a single authoritative article become the cited source across 60 different AI prompts, demonstrating that one high-quality knowledge asset can influence visibility across multiple consumer questions rather than a single search query.
Perhaps most notably, GASP observed a newly launched brand earning citations in ChatGPT within approximately 10 days, suggesting that AI visibility may evolve much faster than marketers have traditionally associated with search performance.
Individually, these observations are encouraging. Collectively, they suggest something more significant. AI is not simply retrieving information.
It is building confidence in which sources and brands deserve to become part of an answer.
AI Is Creating a New Model of Brand Authority
One of the clearest signals emerging from GASP is that AI evaluates authority differently from traditional search.
A search engine ranks webpages.
Generative AI constructs responses.
To generate those responses, a typical AI answer references between four and eight different sources before recommending a brand or answering a question. Rather than relying on one high-ranking page, AI synthesises information from multiple references, looking for consistency, credibility, and evidence that reinforces the same conclusion.
This has profound implications for marketers.
Brand authority is becoming less dependent on the performance of an individual webpage and more dependent on the strength of an organisation’s broader body of knowledge. The implication is that AI appears to reward brands whose expertise is consistently reinforced across multiple trusted sources rather than brands relying on isolated content assets.
Authority, in other words, is becoming cumulative.
What This Means for Marketing Leaders
The emergence of AI-generated discovery does not require marketers to abandon existing digital strategies.
Search, retail media, social platforms, and brand websites will all continue to play important roles within the customer journey.
What changes is how those channels work together.
As AI becomes another layer through which consumers evaluate brands, marketing leaders need to broaden what they consider a visibility strategy.
Three questions become increasingly important.
Is our brand consistently represented across the sources AI is most likely to synthesise?
Strong visibility will depend less on one high-performing asset and more on whether a brand’s expertise is reinforced consistently across owned, earned, and third-party sources.
Are we creating knowledge, or simply creating content?
The GASP findings suggest that authoritative, reusable knowledge assets can influence AI recommendations across dozens of consumer questions. That places a premium on depth, credibility, and consistency over publishing frequency alone.
Do we understand how AI is interpreting our brand today?
Traditional marketing dashboards measure rankings, impressions, traffic, and engagement. Increasingly, marketers may also need to understand how AI describes their brands, which sources it cites, and where gaps in authority or representation exist.
This is why initiatives such as GASP matter.
Not because they provide another optimisation framework, but because they offer early evidence of how AI is interpreting brands in real consumer environments.
For marketing leaders, that evidence can become an important input into future content, communications, and brand-building strategies.
The Next Competitive Advantage May Be Citation
Marketing has always evolved alongside changing consumer behaviour.
Today, consumers are increasingly asking AI to interpret information before they make decisions.
That changes what visibility means.
When 58% of consumers already use generative AI instead of traditional search for product and service recommendations, the strategic question is no longer whether AI influences brand discovery.
It is how brands earn a place within AI-generated answers.
GASP’s early findings suggest that visibility in the AI era will depend less on isolated rankings and more on whether a brand has built a sufficiently credible, consistent, and connected body of knowledge for AI to reference with confidence.
The brands that succeed will not simply be the easiest to find. They will be the ones AI is most confident citing.
