Building Brand Authority in an AI-Mediated Search World

For years, search marketing has been built around a familiar goal: earn enough visibility to get a customer to click. AI-generated search results are changing that equation. For example, a 2025 analysis found that Google users clicked traditional search results in just 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, compared with 15% when it didn’t—suggesting brands may have fewer opportunities to speak for themselves on their own turf.

When an AI system becomes the layer between a company and a prospective customer, brand reputation isn’t shaped only by what the company publishes. The system may synthesize information from a range of sources, and that synthesis isn’t guaranteed to be accurate. Widespread problems, from speculative answers to fabricated links, have been found with the ways generative search tools retrieved and cited source material. For CMOs, that makes the broader information ecosystem surrounding a brand a more immediate marketing concern, since an incomplete, outdated or inaccurate answer can influence perception before a customer ever reaches the company’s website—if they reach it at all.

As AI changes how customers discover and evaluate companies, marketing leaders need to rethink what it takes to earn authority when they may not control the first—and sometimes only—description a buyer sees. Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank, a curated group with expertise in brand storytelling, digital advertising and the rise of AI in marketing, discuss how CMOs can approach brand authority, message consistency and reputation in an AI-mediated search environment.

“Human judgment is becoming the differentiator: the observations, indirect insights and perspectives discovered through experience and reasoning.”

– Paul L. Gunn Jr., Founder of Signal & Anomaly and KUOG Corporation

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Make Your Thinking Discoverable

Paul L. Gunn Jr., Founder of Signal & Anomaly and KUOG Corporation, urges CMOs to think beyond making their brand discoverable to AI and focus on making their thinking discoverable.

“As AI increasingly draws from the same information, consistency alone risks creating sameness,” he says. “Human judgment is becoming the differentiator: the observations, indirect insights and perspectives discovered through experience and reasoning. Those insights should be captured and made visible. Each becomes another signal AI can reason across, creating opportunities for perspectives that did not exist in the original information.”

For Gunn, the larger opportunity is to establish a brand as an ongoing source of ideas worth surfacing.

“Brand authority may increasingly belong to those who continually contribute new thinking, not those who simply repeat what is already known,” he says. “The opportunity isn’t simply to appear in AI’s first answer but to continually give it new signals and perspectives worth elevating into that answer.”

Audit the AI Perception Gap

Lee Salisbury, Founder and CEO of UnitOneNine, calls attention to the disconnect that can develop between a company’s intended brand identity and the version AI systems present to potential buyers.

“Brand authority used to mean repetition across owned channels,” he says. “Now, AI systems compress all of that into one synthesized answer, and most CMOs have never read what that answer actually says about them. I call this the perception gap: the space between how a brand presents itself and how AI describes it to buyers.”

Salisbury says the challenge extends well beyond ensuring that a company uses the same tone across its own properties.

“Message consistency matters differently,” he says. “It’s not about tone across your website and social. It’s about the underlying facts AI models pull from, like reviews, third-party mentions and structured data. Those get compressed first. Your reputation now partly lives in systems you never touch directly.”

That makes understanding the AI-generated version of a brand an ongoing responsibility, Salisbury says.

“CMOs need to audit that gap the way they’d audit a competitor,” he says. “Regularly. Specifically. Before a prospect ever reaches the site.”

Build Authority Beyond Owned Channels

For Kathleen Lucente, Founder and CEO of Red Fan Communications, the shift from ranked results to synthesized answers fundamentally changes the competitive landscape.

“Search ranked; AI answers,” she says. “In search, 10th place still puts you on the page. Second place in a synthesized answer means you are not in it. So authority stops being what you publish. It becomes what gets corroborated elsewhere.”

Even though third parties play a role in AI search results, Lucente says brands are far from powerless in shaping what’s surfaced about them. 

“That is not a black box,” she says. “Seven signals drive it, and you can structure all of them. Here are two where most companies are thin: entity coherence—whether your name, description and category read the same everywhere you appear—and review platforms, where ratings and recency carry more weight than most B2B marketers assume. AI is reading them and pulling that information forward or rejecting you as ‘not validated.’”

Lucente recommends beginning the necessary research by doing exactly what your audience is doing.

“Start by reading what AI systems say about you today,” she says. “Most CMOs never have. Then work the signals, not the page.”

Optimize for Verifiability

Kurt Allen, Vice President of Enrollment, Marketing and Communications at Notre Dame de Namur University, believes AI-mediated search calls for a different objective than simply maximizing brand exposure.

“CMOs need to shift from optimizing for visibility to optimizing for verifiability,” Allen says. “AI systems don’t just rank content; they synthesize it from trusted, consistent and authoritative sources. If your messaging is fragmented across your website, press coverage, thought leadership, customer reviews and third-party profiles, AI may produce an incomplete or inaccurate picture of your brand.”

With consumers becoming increasingly wary of AI search results that don’t include clear sources, Allen says companies should pay particular attention to whether the essential facts and claims underpinning their brand remain aligned wherever they appear.

“The priority becomes building a single, credible source of truth,” he says. “Ensure your brand story, product claims, executive thought leadership and customer proof points are consistent across every channel. Invest in high-quality, authoritative content that others reference, not just content that ranks.”

“Even though ‘earned’ media drives the highest percentage of citations, how LLMs define ‘earned’ includes everything from Reddit mentions to review sites like G2 or the App Store.”

– Lindsey Groepper, Executive Vice President of Growth for PANBlast

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Keep the Full Channel Mix Working

AI search doesn’t make the rest of the marketing ecosystem irrelevant, according to Lindsey Groepper, Executive Vice President of Growth for PANBlast. 

“What the various AI search visibility tools show is that a channel mix is what drives both discoverability and authority—there is no one channel that reigns supreme,” she says. “Even though ‘earned’ media drives the highest percentage of citations, how LLMs define ‘earned’ includes everything from Reddit mentions to review sites like G2 or the App Store.”

As those interfaces occupy more of the search journey, Groepper says marketers need to reconsider what they expect different channels to accomplish.

“Marketing leaders still need to invest in paid, earned, owned and shared media, but they also need to rethink the strategies that would traditionally drive to a website, as many searches end in a zero-click journey.”

Get the Brand Basics Right

For companies racing to improve their visibility in AI search, Amber Brown, Senior Vice President of Product and Marketing for Clario, cautions against overlooking the simple information customers—and AI systems—may need.

“In an AI-mediated search environment, brands need to become more foundational, not more complex,” she says. “This is especially easy to overlook when a company has been in the market for decades and assumes its basic story is already understood.”

Brown has seen the value of returning to those basics firsthand.

“At one organization, we published FAQs that internal scientists and some customers considered ‘too basic,’” she says. “Yet those answers appeared more frequently than our complex content and significantly improved our AI visibility, rankings and message consistency.”

For Brown, the lesson is that companies shouldn’t assume either customers or AI systems will fill in missing context correctly.

“CMOs need to ensure the brand clearly answers its most foundational questions,” she says. “Otherwise, AI will assemble the brand story for you, and it may not be the story you want or the one that performs.”

Eliminate Contradictions at the Source

Boris Dzhingarov, CEO of ESBO Ltd., regularly checks how leading AI platforms characterize the brands he works with. What he finds isn’t always current—or flattering.

“There is no page two in an AI answer,” he says. “When a model describes your company, it repeats whatever the internet says most consistently, and it trusts third parties more than your homepage. Since early 2025, I have opened client work by asking ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity about the brand, and the results often shock people—old pricing, a pivot from 2019, a competitor’s framing.”

Rather than trying to counter conflicting information by simply producing more content, Dzhingarov recommends addressing discrepancies where they originate.

“For CMOs, authority now comes down to consistency,” he says. “Pick one canonical story and make sure it shows up everywhere a model reads: press coverage, directories, review sites and your own pages. Fix contradictions at the source instead of publishing over them. And check monthly, because you cannot manage a reputation you have never asked the machines about.”

Ensure Your Preferred Story Is Easy to Find

Hastimal Jangid, Co-Founder of Coozmoo Digital Solutions, sees a significant paradigm shift for brands being ushered in by AI-driven single search interactions.

“Brand authority used to be built through repeated exposure across many touchpoints, but AI answers compress that into a single moment,” he says. “If an AI system summarizes your company in one paragraph, that paragraph is now doing the work your entire content strategy used to do. There’s no scroll.”

When information from across the web is being synthesized into a single moment, inconsistencies that once might have remained isolated can become more consequential.

“It changes the job,” Jangid says. “CMOs need to make sure the most accurate, most complete version of their story is the one that’s easiest for AI systems to find and cite—you need consistent language across the website, press, reviews and third-party sources, because AI is synthesizing from all of it, not just your homepage. Sloppy or contradictory messaging anywhere becomes a liability everywhere.”

Jangid says protecting reputation increasingly means doing the work before an inaccurate or incomplete summary reaches the customer.

“It raises the stakes on reputation,” he says. “You can’t out-argue a bad summary in real time. The real work is upstream: making sure what’s true and differentiated about your brand is so clearly and consistently stated that it’s hard for any system to get wrong.”

Treat Reputation as an Organizationwide Signal

AI-mediated search also challenges traditional boundaries between marketing and other functions, says Ramya Chandrasekaran, Chief Communications Officer for The QI Group.

“CMOs need to stop treating AI as simply another marketing channel,” she says. “AI doesn’t create reputation. It compresses it. It synthesizes signals from news coverage, executive thought leadership, customer experiences, third-party validation, regulators, Wikipedia, investor information and owned content into a single answer. That makes communications, public affairs, customer experience and marketing inseparable.”

For Chandrasekaran, the result is a broader view of what it means for a brand to build an authoritative presence.

“The new competitive advantage isn’t just visibility or consistency,” she says. “It’s ensuring the strongest, most credible signals about your organization are also the most verifiable, because AI will amplify what the wider information ecosystem consistently believes to be true.”

“Protecting your brand now includes correcting misinformation just as proactively as you would in traditional media.”

– Emily Popson, Senior Vice President of Marketing at CallRail

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Defend Your Brand’s Story

Despite the speed of change surrounding AI search, Emily Popson, Senior Vice President of Marketing at CallRail, sees enduring value in some of marketing’s oldest principles.

“At a time when marketing feels like it’s changing by the minute, I actually think AI is pushing us back toward the fundamentals,” she says. “The companies that will earn accurate representation from AI systems are the ones with a clear brand, a consistent message and the discipline to repeat that message across every touchpoint. In other words, repetition: one of the most time-tested and proven marketing tactics of all time.”

Popson adds that while strong technical SEO and structured data matter more than ever, they aren’t substitutes for clarity and accuracy.

“If AI platforms are surfacing inaccurate information about your company, don’t shrug it off,” she urges. “Protecting your brand now includes correcting misinformation just as proactively as you would in traditional media. The technology is changing, but the principles of building trust aren’t.”

Building Brand Authority for AI Search

• Make original thinking part of your brand’s digital footprint. Publishing distinctive insights gives AI systems more substantive signals to associate with your company instead of relying only on widely repeated information.
• Regularly audit how AI systems describe your brand. Compare those answers with the identity you intend to project, paying particular attention to facts drawn from reviews, third-party mentions and structured data.
• Strengthen the signals that corroborate your brand beyond owned channels. Consistent descriptions, current reviews and credible third-party validation can help reinforce the version of your company AI systems surface.
• Optimize brand information for verifiability, not just visibility. Keep core claims, thought leadership and proof points consistent across channels so AI systems encounter a credible, coherent source of truth.
• Maintain a broad mix of paid, earned, owned and shared media. As more searches end without a website visit, each channel can contribute to how AI systems discover and interpret a brand.
• Clearly answer your audience’s most basic questions. Straightforward, foundational content can help prevent AI systems from filling gaps with incomplete or inaccurate information.
• Fix conflicting information where it originates. Correct outdated or contradictory details across directories, review sites, media coverage and owned content rather than trying to drown them out with new material.
• Make the most accurate version of your brand story easy to find. Clear, consistent information across the sources AI systems consult reduces the chance that a fragmented story becomes the dominant one.
• Treat AI-era reputation management as a cross-functional responsibility. Marketing, communications, public affairs and customer experience all contribute signals that can shape how an organization is represented.
• Keep clarity, consistency and trust at the center of your strategy. Technical optimization matters, but it can’t compensate for an unclear brand story or inaccurate information left uncorrected.

When AI Becomes Part of the Brand Experience

AI-mediated search may change where customers first encounter a company, but it doesn’t eliminate the fundamentals of building brand authority. Clear messaging, credible third-party validation, consistent information and a strong reputation across channels all become more important when an AI system may condense a sprawling digital footprint into a single response.

For CMOs, the challenge ahead is to manage not only what the brand says but also the broader information environment from which AI systems construct their answers. As those systems become a more common gateway to discovery and evaluation, companies that continually strengthen, verify and monitor the signals surrounding their brands will be better positioned to influence the story customers encounter first.