By Charles Lee Mathews. If AI increasingly decides which brands consumers see and trust, what role does marketing still play? MarkLives MEDIA put the question to AI and digital marketing experts. They say that marketing is being forever changed by AI. But brands are still as important as ever.
“Brand strategy becomes the architecture of recognition. Its job is no longer only to persuade humans over time, but to make the business clear, consistent, and retrievable across every system that may interpret it,” says Kevin Andrew Silver, CEO of Macrocosm Ultra Digital.
“In AI search, the brand must be understood before it can be recommended. That means positioning, proof, language, entities, product meaning, category relevance, trust signals, and conversion paths must all align,” says Silver.
Brand building becomes everyone’s job
The big step change is that responsibility for this no longer sits solely with marketing. “The CMO may lead the narrative, but brand strategy becomes a shared operating responsibility across leadership, sales, SEO, AI optimisation, product, customer experience, data and technical teams. The business must decide what it wants to be known for, then make that truth machine-readable and human-believable,” he says.
“Brand strategy is now the system that ensures the business is understood, remembered, and chosen when the customer asks once and the AI answers once,” says Silver.
“Brand strategy becomes more important, not less,” says Felix Norton, managing director at Woww Digital. “If AI search collapses discovery, comparison and recommendation into one answer, then the brand strategy needs to decide what the AI should understand about you before that moment happens. A brand is no longer just what people remember. It is also what machines can interpret, verify and confidently recommend,” says Norton.
The clarity of cold, hard proof
He says this means a brand strategy must increasingly be based on clarity. “Who are we for? What problem do we solve? Why should we be trusted? What proof exists? Where is that proof published? Is that story consistent across our website, reviews, PR, social media, case studies, directory listings and third-party sources?” Norton says firing off a list of questions that brands now need to clearly resolve.
Like Silver, Norton believes that discoverability is not the sole domain of marketing but should be owned by everyone who shapes the entity that AI systems understand.
“At its simplest, brand strategy is the business’s answer to why it should be chosen, trusted and remembered. But in an AI-led search environment, that answer needs to be more than a marketing message. It needs to be clear enough for customers to understand, consistent enough for the market to recognise, and credible enough for machines to interpret,” says Casey van Niekerk, head of growth and marketing at Ruby Digital.
Time to think in systems, not campaigns
“This requires more systemic thinking from leadership, because visibility, customer experience, data, reputation and commercial performance are all connected. Marketing may lead the articulation of the brand, but leadership, sales, product, customer experience and operations all shape whether the brand promise is actually true,” van Niekerk says.
“AI-generated answers are shaped by a combination of available information, source credibility, content structure, client context, platform rules and the model’s interpretation of relevance. That means brands can no longer think only in terms of ranking for a keyword,” she says. Brands now need to consider whether they are consistently part of the conversation about the questions their market is asking. This includes their website, third-party mentions, reviews, case studies, comparison content, client feedback and industry credibility.
“In traditional search, visibility was often about being discoverable. In AI search, it becomes about being understood, selected and included in the answer, which requires a more holistic and consistent approach to marketing across the internet,” says van Niekerk.
Your reputation will be verified
“Every touchpoint counts, and the business leader must own coherence, while product, PR, data, sales, and customer experience all create the signals that make the brand recommendable,” says Rafiq Phillips, co-founder and CTO at Naritive Tech. “In this looming era of agentic commerce, strategy must pivot from capturing direct website clicks to cultivating earned authority that machines can independently verify,” he says.
“If AI recommends your product without serving an ad, traditional web analytics are mostly blind. There may be no impression, no click, no UTM and no referral path, which means marketers need to measure share of model (SoM), not just share of traffic. SoM is how often and how accurately your brand appears in AI-generated answers compared with competitors,” he explains.
“For marketers, this means auditing what AI systems know, believe, and repeat about your brand; how often you surface compared to competitors; and whether your knowledge graph, content, PR, reviews, and structured data give models enough reason to recommend you,” Phillips says.
Be the signal, not the noise
“The budget belongs to an integrated technical marketing team that brings together brand, PR, SEO, content, data, product marketing and customer experience. Every rand spent now needs to build the signals that make the brand visible, credible and recommendable inside AI-led journeys. Paid media can no longer carry the load alone. Every rand not spent on organic authority, structured optimisation and earned trust now has to work much harder to secure baseline model representation,” Phillips adds.
AI’s biggest benefit for the search ecosystem is that its curation cleans things up, says Malcolm Peters, head of organic search at Incubeta. “The algorithms look for clarity, safety, and verifiable data, thereby penalising spam and rewarding high-quality sites. For CMOs, this means SEO is a cleaner, more predictable discipline focused on technical excellence and clear data plumbing rather than trying to out-trick a search engine,” he says.
“AI search rewards true depth and digital footprint management, which is pure SEO territory,” says Peters. Because AI models prioritise original data and high-trust hubs, the goal is to establish brands as a definitive ground truth across the web. And to be perceived as good and worthy, brands need to have real, verified reputations from more democratic communities like Reddit, rather than PR puffery. As a result, the movement is less about having good messaging and advertising and more about actually being good.
Welcome to the C-Suite
And for marketers who’ve always wanted a seat at the boardroom table, this wish is being realised. “We are moving away from being commodity content creators to becoming enterprise data strategists. We aren’t just optimising web pages; we are managing the entire knowledge graph of a business, making us core strategic partners to the C-suite,” says Peters.
Jaco Lintvelt, MD, Incubeta South Africa, offers marketers a three-point plan to consider:
- The buying journey can now be automated: Today’s buying process is a continuous loop, and we are moving toward a future where AI agents will do the actual shopping and buying for consumers. To stay relevant, your marketing must bridge the gap between human research and automated AI transactions.
- First-party data is your most valuable asset: Without your own verified data, your AI can’t accurately predict customer behaviour or drive sales. You need to consolidate this data into a single hub to train AI tools specifically for your business.
- Rethinking metrics and budgets: If an AI recommends your product without showing a traditional ad, old metrics like “cost-per-click” are completely useless, and they will lose the CFO’s support immediately. To prove true ROI, marketers need advanced tools like marketing mix modelling. Because proving this value is so critical, building a solid data infrastructure is no longer just a marketing expense; it’s a core company investment that the CEO and CFO need to own.
None of this makes brand strategy less important. It just makes it harder to fake. For a generation of marketers who built their careers on winning attention, the next epoch is one in which brands will be judged by whether the truth about their business survives contact with a machine that has no interest in flattering anyone.
The old discipline was persuasion. The new one is verification.
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.
