EP 505: How Brands Win in AI Search
🎯 Summary
Podcast Summary: EP 505: How Brands Win in AI Search
This episode of the Everyday AI Show, hosted by Jordan Wilson and featuring Chris Andrew (CEO and Co-founder of Scrunch AI), dives deep into the seismic shift occurring as AI search engines (like those integrated into ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews) begin to displace traditional organic web browsing. The central theme is how brands must adapt their digital strategy to ensure visibility and influence when AI models become the primary broker between user intent and brand information.
1. Focus Area
The primary focus is Brand Strategy and Optimization for Generative AI Search. This includes analyzing the changing customer journey, the role of AI crawlers, the diminishing importance of traditional website visits for initial discovery, and the necessity of providing clear, retrievable data to Large Language Models (LLMs).
2. Key Technical Insights
- AI Crawlers as Primary Consumers: AI models are actively crawling websites to ingest unstructured data. Brands must cater to these crawlers, treating them as the primary “top-of-the-funnel buyer” rather than blocking them out of fear.
- Shift from Keywords to Intent: Traditional SEO tactics (keyword stuffing, heavy backlinking) are becoming less effective for AI overviews. Optimization must pivot toward providing clear, concise, and accurate answers directly addressing user intent, as LLMs synthesize information differently than traditional search algorithms.
- The Criticality of Third-Party Content: For non-branded searches, AI models rely heavily (80%+) on third-party content (reviews, industry sites, media) to form an unbiased view of a category. Brands must monitor and influence what is being said about them on these external platforms.
3. Business/Investment Angle
- The Conversion Funnel is Changing: The traditional marketing funnel is flattening or inverting. Users arrive at a brand’s website much later in the journey, already highly educated by AI summaries, often ready to convert immediately. This means initial discovery is happening outside the brand’s direct control.
- Data-Driven Monitoring is Essential: Brands need immediate insight into how they are represented in AI search results, how frequently AI crawlers access their site, and the conversion rate of traffic referred from AI platforms (which is noted to convert at 2x to 5x the rate of traditional organic traffic).
- Fear-Based Blocking is Detrimental: Companies blocking AI crawlers risk being misrepresented, as the models will be forced to piece together information about the brand solely from third-party sources.
4. Notable Companies/People
- Chris Andrew (Scrunch AI): Guest expert, CEO of an enterprise platform focused on optimizing content for AI search.
- Jordan Wilson (Everyday AI): Host, emphasizing practical application of AI.
- Google/Gemini: Mentioned for rolling out Veo (text-to-video) and integrating AI search overviews, signaling this shift is permanent.
- Anthropic (Claude): Noted for adding web research and Google Workspace integration, increasing competition in the AI assistant space.
- OpenAI (ChatGPT/Social Network): Mentioned for developing its own search index (moving away from Bing) and exploring a social network to gather proprietary training data.
5. Future Implications
The conversation strongly suggests that AI search is not a temporary phase but the new default state of the internet. Brands that fail to adapt their content strategy to serve AI crawlers and agents will lose influence over the early stages of the customer journey. The future demands a shift from “browsing necessity” to “answer delivery,” fundamentally altering marketing spend and content creation incentives.
6. Target Audience
This episode is highly valuable for Digital Marketing Professionals, SEO Specialists, CMOs, and Enterprise Technology Leaders who are responsible for digital presence, customer acquisition, and understanding the commercial impact of generative AI adoption.
🏢 Companies Mentioned
đź’¬ Key Insights
"What's really interesting about this shift is the long tail of content is becoming more relevant because the models are trying to match intent to the right source. And so we've seen a lot of instances where content from the first couple pages of Google or Bing or Brave, or whatever browser you're using, doesn't even show up in an AI search result."
"one of the biggest shifts that I think brands are accepting is, you know, for a non-branded search, it's 80% plus of the websites that are cited by models are third-party content websites, right?"
"If you see that the new AI mode, right? Yeah, we've all seen the AI search overviews, but now there's AI Mode, and in Google's deep research tools now with the 2.5, it's fantastic. So if you think this is some phase or some beta program from Google, it's not. This is the new way that the internet works."
"my message is you need to think that if you're in the business of getting your product and service in front of your buyer, your new broker to the buyer is the AI crawler."
"think of the primary consumer of that content as an AI crawler. You know, we don't need to be optimizing your blog posts for 50 keywords and having all of the backlinks. You need to be optimizing your blog post about the education stage for an AI crawler trying to get concise, accurate data to represent you as an expert back to the ultimate buyer."
"large language models want language. They've been gathering all of the language in the world. And so when they come to your site to learn about your brand, they're looking for unstructured data, they're looking for text that they can then bring back into the model to synthesize with other sources to ideally represent you to your buyer."