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Advertising groups and tech start-ups have been racing to find ways to help brands boost their likelihood of surfacing in results from artificial intelligence chatbots, marking a new era of “search engine optimisation”.
Companies such as Profound and Brandtech have developed software for monitoring how frequently brands were surfaced by AI-powered services such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Overviews feature.
Brands such as fintech company Ramp, jobs search site Indeed and Pernod Ricard-owned Scottish whisky maker Chivas Brothers have adopted the software. They are hoping to reach millions of users who regularly use generative AI products as a new method to search for information online — a shift that poses a long-term threat for Google’s main business.
“This is about much more than just getting your website indexed in their results. This is about recognising large language models as the ultimate influencer,” said Jack Smyth, partner at marketing technology group Brandtech, which has created its own interface for brands.
These new tools are able to predict an AI model’s sentiment towards companies by feeding a slew of text prompts to chatbots and analysing the results. The technology is then used to create a ranking of brands, allowing agencies to advise on how best to ensure they are mentioned by the models.
The moves come as advertisers face pressure from the rising use of AI to create and target their marketing. Meta and Google have been developing self-serve tools for running ad campaigns directly to brands, in a potential threat to the work of agencies and media buyers.
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Some agencies are spotting the opportunity to offer new services to brands as AI becomes more prevalent and so-called search engine optimisation becomes less relevant.
Research from consultancy Bain found that 80 per cent of consumers now rely on AI-written results for at least 40 per cent of their searches, reducing organic web traffic by up to 25 per cent. About 60 per cent of searches now end without the users clicking through to another website, its research found.
However, on Thursday, Google’s parent company Alphabet announced its core search and advertising business grew almost 10 per cent to $50.7bn in the first quarter of the year.
The strong results provided reassurance to investors concerned about the growing popularity rival AI chatbots such as Elon Musk’s Grok, while also being on alert for evidence that answers from Google’s own Gemini chatbot and AI summaries are cannibalising its search business by reducing the number of user clicks on ads.
Still, agencies are racing to help corporate clients trying to appear within the results generated by AI services.
Brandtech has created a ‘Share of Model’ product that charges brands to see similar analysis and offers guidance on adjusting website text and image assets to better serve AI search.
Profound, which raised $3.5mn in seed funding in August led by Khosla Ventures, offers a data analytics platform which allows brands to track common queries related to their industry and understand their performance in AI searches.
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“Traditional search has been one of the biggest monopolies in the history of the internet,” said James Cadwallader, co-founder of Profound. “And for the first time, it feels like the castle walls are cracking. This is a CDs to streaming moment”.
The software requires an understanding of how the individual models surface brands. ChatGPT, for example, uses a traditional web search and then evaluates the different sources for what information is most relevant for the user, including assessing the credibility and authority of the website.
Adam Fry, OpenAI’s ChatGPT search lead, said users are being more nuanced and precise in the questions they are asking, such as “can you find a quiet restaurant for a family of five in New York”, instead of “restaurants in New York”.
“The really new thing here is you have a layer of ChatGPT’s model, a layer of intelligence above traditional search,” said Fry.
Meanwhile, Perplexity, an AI-driven search engine, is currently piloting sponsored “questions” as a suggested follow-up after a user query.
“LLMs understand more content and can be more nuanced. They can find contradictions or find if information is misleading . . . so it’s a much more thorough process than reviewing links,” said Denis Yarats, co-founder of Perplexity. “It is much harder to be a target of SEO because the only sort of true strategy is to be as relevant as possible and provide good content.”
Data visualisation by Janina Conboye