By Kate Watts, CEO, Fifty Thousand Feet
Not long ago, brands had to learn how to optimize for search engines. Now, brands are learning new rules for AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
AI search engines are increasingly deciding what gets seen, what gets cited, and what gets skipped, all within conveniently organized chats. Strong brands show up more often in these results, not because of keyword hacks, but because of how consistently and credibly they appear across the digital landscape. That’s the fundamental shift: AI search doesn’t just reward relevance. It rewards recognizable presence.
AI search counts for only a small fraction of all searches being done today. But forward-thinking brands need to figure out how to be findable by AI search now in order to get an edge on those that do not. This means adapting to AI-driven search without being defined by it. Indeed, it means capitalizing on AI search to make your brand memorably timeless instead of fleeting.
So, how do you do that?
From Keywords to Brands
To appreciate how AI search elevates the value of a strong brand, it’s important to understand what’s fundamentally different about how AI discovery works.
Traditional search engines return a list of links based on keyword matching. If a brand wants to be found, it focuses on showing up as high as possible in the results, either through SEO or paid search. But AI search doesn’t just deliver links. It delivers answers.
AI assistants answer users’ questions by pulling content from a wide range of online sources, including websites, news articles, and community forums, and then synthesizing everything it finds into a single, conversational response. The user doesn’t need to click around for a detailed answer.
Because AI no longer relies on a single keyword query or a handful of clickable results, it prioritizes content that feels credible, complete, and contextually relevant. It amplifies the most coherent signals, not the most optimized headlines. It favors entities that show up consistently across formats and domains, not just in a webpage’s metadata.
In that context, brands matter more than keywords. According to research from Ahrefs, one of the best predictors of brand visibility in Google’s AI results is branded search volume and widespread web presence, not keyword targeting. AI tools tend to cite brands that are talked about frequently and consistently across different formats and platforms. If you’ve built equity—through product explainers, thought leadership, reviews, Wikipedia entries, FAQs, Reddit participation, YouTube content, and more—AI sees you as a reliable source.
If you haven’t, it doesn’t matter how strong your keyword game is. You may never be cited at all. Put another way: traditional SEO was about winning the click. AI search is about earning the mention.
How to Be Timeless with AI Search
Being timeless in the AI era means showing up with clarity and consistency, wherever and however your brand is encountered. Here’s how:
- Be consistent in voice and tone: make sure your brand sounds the same across product pages, press releases, social posts, and third-party mentions. Coherence builds recognition both for people and AI.
- Publish content that acts like a source of truth: create material that reads like a definitive reference, like FAQs, product explainers, leadership POVs, and brand-owned definitions. AI engines cite content they deem authoritative, not promotional.
- Earn mentions in trusted third-party environments: Focus on securing references in industry publications, respected directories, forums, and Q&A platforms. AI weighs off-site signals heavily when deciding what’s credible.
- Structure your media for AI readability: label, caption, and summarize your content, whether it’s a video, podcast, or white paper. Add transcripts and metadata so AI can easily parse and cite your work.
- Make brand stewardship a daily practice: regularly audit how AI describes your brand. Monitor for outdated sources, inconsistencies, or missed opportunities. Adjust and update your content ecosystem to protect brand coherence over time.
- Use structured data (schema markup) wherever possible: this helps AI better understand and classify your content when parsing web pages for inclusion in answer generation.
- Refresh evergreen content: AI models favor fresh, up-to-date sources. Revisiting and updating older high-performing content signals continued relevance.
- Monitor AI platforms: the universe of AI assistants continues to grow. Keep an eye on how your brand appears across multiple AI assistants. Maximize visibility across them.
Timeless brands are built, maintained, and reinforced across every channel where people and machines are paying attention. Brands that succeed in the era of AI discovery built to be remembered by both people and machines. That’s what it means to be timeless now.
