TL;DR
Consumers are already using AI to research purchases, but most marketers have no system for shaping what AI says about their brand
Our research shows 1 in 3 marketers believe their brand website carries the most weight in shaping how AI describes them
Less than 10% of what AI search says about a brand comes from that brand’s own website, according to McKinsey
This guide previews the three-step system in our new playbook: align SEO and creator teams around a shared prompt list, build a creator mix around authority, and activate and measure that content over time
Table of Contents
You’ve typed your brand name into AI search, compared the answer to your competitors, and closed the tab without a clear next step. If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone, and you’re not behind. Almost nobody has a real system for this yet.
AI search is moving faster than most marketing teams can build processes around, and checking has become the whole strategy: check, worry, wait, repeat. Meanwhile, consumers aren’t waiting. AI has already become a default research tool, well ahead of most brands having any plan for what to do about it.
In a survey of nearly 500 marketers, we found:
86% have manually checked how AI describes their brand, yet most have no system for what to do next
94% say AI research is already part of the customer journey, either broadly or in specific categories
91% agree consumers are using AI tools to research products before they buy
Everyone’s watching AI search reshape discovery, but almost nobody has a repeatable process for influencing it. That makes now the right moment to name what’s happening and give marketers a framework for acting on it, which is exactly what our new playbook sets out to do.
What marketers are actually afraid of
Ask marketers what worries them most about AI search, and the answer isn’t being absent from the conversation: it’s showing up inaccurately.
31% say their top concern is AI giving inaccurate information about their brand
28% worry AI misunderstands their product claims or benefits
Only 11% worry about simply not being mentioned at all
Being described incorrectly is a trust problem, and trust is hard to win back once a wrong version of a brand’s story starts getting repeated across every answer a model gives.
Introducing Creator AEO: the next competitive divide
Answer engine optimization, or AEO, is the practice of optimizing your brand for AI search results. It shares plenty of DNA with SEO, but the answers AI models draw from are scattered across the internet rather than concentrated on your owned site. We see the discipline resting on four pillars:
Brand-owned content
Creator and UGC
Earned media and editorial coverage
Forum and community mentions
Most AEO conversations so far have focused on the first and third. Our AI search playbook is built around the second, because it’s the pillar most brands are underinvesting in and it’s the least understood.
Why creator content is the lever most brands are missing
Our internal data shows creator content is cited in roughly 1 in 3 AI answers. It’s one of several sources shaping how AI describes a brand, alongside owned content and earned media, but it’s the one most brands haven’t built a strategy around yet.
Creator content builds the kind of validation and consensus that LLMs weigh heavily: high-authority voices publishing long-form expertise, real users sharing unprompted opinions in the exact spaces AI already cites.
As our co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Lyle Stevens, puts it: “Start to think of an LLM as its own form of an influencer in the purchase journey, and you can’t ignore it. You have to spend time there. Otherwise, you’re ceding to your competitive set who will probably start to take share of model away from you.”
The gap between what marketers believe and what actually works
About a third of marketers believe their own brand website carries the most weight in shaping how AI describes them. The research says otherwise: according to McKinsey, less than 10% of what AI search says about a brand comes from that brand’s own content. If owned content isn’t doing the heavy lifting, the creators talking about your brand are.
Follower count doesn’t predict which of them get cited, either. Our research found that 57% of the YouTube videos AI cites come from channels with fewer than 100K followers.
As Cameron Miskho, our Senior Director of Strategic Consulting, explains: “There is no correlation between follower count and citation rate. It really comes down to the perceived authority of a creator by LLMs. Volume always beats specificity: the more creators around a specific topic saying the same thing, the more likely some of them get cited, and the more it's validating each other around those claims.”
Get the complete guide to creator AEO
The full playbook walks through exactly how to operationalize this:
Aligning SEO and creator teams around a shared prompt list
Rebuilding your creator mix around authority instead of reach
Activating and measuring creator content so it keeps earning citations over time
It includes the monthly tracking process our strategists use with enterprise brands, along with the questions to ask when share of model starts slipping.
We’ve spent the past year in the room with top enterprise brands building exactly this system, the scorecards, prompt strategies, and creator mixes that turn a reactive habit into a repeatable one. This is one of the first frameworks of its kind, and we built it because the brands that treat AEO as a system now will be the ones AI is still citing a year from now. Read the playbook.
