By Charles Lee Mathews. The experts agree: feed the machine or else you’ll be nowhere.
Generative AI is dismantling the old rules of discoverability. Instead of serving lists of links, AI assistants deliver single synthesised answers, forcing marketers and media agencies to abandon the idea of ‘page one’ altogether.
AI doesn’t just change how people find information. It changes what it means to be findable. Traditional SEO, once a predictable blend of keywords, backlinks, and technical hygiene, is morphing into a new discipline. The new playbook is about training AI itself to recognise, understand, and promote your brand.
If you’re not in the dataset, you don’t exist
“If you don’t feed the machine, it learns from someone else. And you might not like what it says,” warns Pareen Shah, head of analytics at Rogerwilco. Generative AI doesn’t invent truth, she stresses: it assembles what’s already out there. “If your voice isn’t in the dataset, your brand disappears from the narrative.”
For Shah, that means the job of content has changed. “The new role of content isn’t to drive clicks, it’s to shape the inputs that shape the answers,” she explains. Blogs, reports and articles are training data. “AI might not credit you. But if you’re not publishing, you’re not visible — to people or machines.”
And forget relying on media spend. “Paid media won’t save you,” she says. “You can’t outbid an AI summary. If you’re not showing up in the answer, your ad budget is just renting attention, not building presence. SEO is no longer a hygiene. It’s survival.”
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From ranking to relevance
While the tools are new, the principle remains the same: optimise for humans first, states Scott Gray, co-founder of Supertube Associates. “The core principle has always been to create a fantastic, authoritative, and seamless experience for a human. Since AI models are designed to evaluate content from a human-centric perspective, a well-built site optimised for users will also be a site that AI values and references,” Gray says
“The economic engine of the internet — advertising — is too powerful to be dismantled. AI platform providers will be looking for ways to attract, not alienate, marketing dollars. The key uncertainty is how these new ad models will function,” Gray explains.
His new playbook? “While the AI landscape is still in its infancy, CMOs and agencies must be proactive rather than reactive. Key strategic shifts include:
- Prioritise brand over clicks: As direct traffic from search becomes less certain, strong brand recall and direct customer relationships become paramount. The best marketing will be an excellent product and service that generates organic conversation.
- Diversify attention channels: Over-reliance on a single channel, like Google search, is now a great risk. Budgets should be diversified across platforms where engaged attention is high, such as social media, creator marketing, and community platforms.
- Prepare for an API-driven world: CMOs should start thinking of their brand not just as a website for humans, but as a set of data and services that can be accessed programmatically by AI agents. This means investing in the technical infrastructure to make your products and information machine-readable.
- Embrace experimentation: This is not the time to wait and see. CMOs must allocate a portion of their budget and team resources to experimenting with new AI platforms, understanding user behaviour, and learning how their brand can provide value in these new ecosystems. The goal is to shift from ‘renting attention’ on search engines to owning the customer relationship directly,” Gray advises.
Contextual authority rules
“The ROI curve for traditional SEO is bending down. Technical hygiene (schema, speed, accessibility) is the ticket to the dance; backlinks still confer trust signals that models read. Yet the marginal gain now comes from contextual authority, being the cited expert, not merely the linked domain, says Vlad Shvets, co-founder & CEO of Qvery.ai.
Marketers can influence AI-generated answers without paying for ads by focusing on three distinct aspects of discoverability, says Shvets:
“Three levers:
- Authoritative publishing: Original research, deep explainers, and first‑party data sets that models prefer for grounding.
- Strategic citations: Contribute to, or get quoted in, the high‑authority sources your audience already trusts (industry associations, academic papers, renowned forums).
- Structured signals: Offer clean, well-licensed structured data (for example, product specs under CC‑BY) so the model can quote you verbatim,” he says.
Shvets stresses that earned visibility still exists. ”It’s just mediated by algorithms with a different appetite,” he says.
Publish or fade away
“By writing content that reinforces the association between your brand and your industry, you teach LLMs to connect the two,” says Hana Montgomery, director of search experience, digital PR and content at Incubeta. She urges brands to feed AI with new, unique data and maintain a strong digital reputation — from Reddit mentions to Wikipedia entries. “It really goes back to brand building, which means your digital reputation has never been more important. The majority of it is brand building and free.”
Rafiq Phillips, co-founder and CTO at Naritive Tech, says playbooks must now extend beyond text. “Optimise not just for text but also for visual and voice search, preparing for where these multi-modal interactions become increasingly common in South Africa, especially with the anticipated broader availability of tools like Gemini. It’s about building a rich and comprehensive online presence that AI can understand and leverage across all the ways users choose to search.”
He adds that strategy should evolve in lockstep with technology. “Prioritise creating E-E-A-T content, invest in semantic proficiency, and embrace innovative measurement. We should cultivate enduring brand authority and enable adaptive innovation in response to AI advancements and the imminent arrival of more integrated AI experiences in any device, in any format, anywhere. CMOs need to be proactive and ensure their strategies are ready for this evolving landscape,” Phillips says.
The new playbook
The AI era demands a recalibration: treat your content as training data; diversify beyond one discovery channel; claim authoritative citations; and optimise for humans, machines, and multiple modes of search.
There is no page one in AI search, only the answer. “In short: AI is rewriting how people discover, decide, and trust. CMOs must stop optimising for the funnel and start designing for the answer,” Shah says.
If you’re not part of the answers offered by AI, you’re nowhere.
Charles Lee Mathews is a senior editor to MarkLives MEDIA and a senior writer to MarkLives.com, as well as co-founder of The Writers, a writing consultancy.
