Google Search has drastically changed. Sure, the search results appear if you scroll down far enough. But the results most searchers are looking at? AI Overviews at the top, perhaps the clearest example of generative search.
AI Overviews is a small, bolt-on addition to Google’s user interface, but it reshapes how audiences discover and evaluate brands, as well as the way your brand is perceived. Its responses pull from live web content based on many traditional ranking signals, but it aims to solve user queries on its own, pushing users away from brand sites and deeper into the AI-driven search environment.
Users now engage with brands completely outside of owned channels like your website, AI search becomes the first brand-audience touchpoint. What it says to billions of users can make or break brand perception, narrative, and reputation.
Let’s start with what generative search is and how its unique value proposition evolves the entire search landscape.
Generative search essentials
What is generative search?
Built on the foundation of generative AI and large language models (LLMs), generative search extends genAI’s capabilities from creating content and chatting with users to answering complex user queries along with sources and follow-up suggestions.
While Google’s AI Overviews is the most literal version of generative search due to its implementation in Google’s ecosystem (along with Gemini and AI Mode), it’s just one of many generative search platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude.
The generative search evolution
The days of ‘Googling’ aren’t over, but consumer paths are more diverse than ever before. There’s less need for digging through search results when AI can solve your queries quickly with purpose-built answers.
Especially important for brands, generative search “turns on” when a user asks any of these platforms for an answer that:
- Requires timeliness
- Requires a high degree of accuracy
- Relates to high-consequence decisions.
That means virtually all brand-related queries are within generative search’s purview. Getting the right narrative, therefore, means building positive, brand-friendly results in the source material — the content that ranks in traditional search.
The impact on audiences
The shift to generative search is changing engagement, but it’s also shifting how brand perception is created, and ushering in new risks and vulnerabilities. The most important audiences include consumers, customers, prospective and current employees, investors, stockholders, and regulators.
A risk assessment
Generative search doesn’t just affect marketing performance. It redefines how every critical audience understands, evaluates, and judges your brand. Here’s the search dynamic across four key audiences:
| Customers | Employees | Investors | Regulators | |
| Behavior | Discover, evaluate, and decide via AI, often before visiting a website. | AI-generated summaries shape first impressions with content from third-party sources. | AI synthesizes news and financial signals to shape investor perception. | AI blends sources, increasing spread and opacity of misinformation. |
| Risks | Inaccurate info, negative bias, or brand exclusion. | Incomplete, outdated, or unfair portrayals. | Overemphasis on controversy or perceived risk. | Investigations, reputational harm, and operational disruption. |
These changes in audience behavior, fueled by AI’s fast evolution into a unified search solution, pose complex challenges. A valuable and controllable channel shifted from a protective layer for brand reputation to an AI-driven battlefield.
In this environment, brand visibility isn’t about ranking alone. It’s about influencing and inserting your narrative into the source material LLMs trust. Brands need to achieve this consistently and across channels, and make a long-term shift.
What brands and leaders can do
Start by adopting an AI-focused proactive approach to guide your brand forward. The key is a reorientation around a few foundational elements:
- Monitoring
- Measurement
- Content strategy
- Online reputation management
Together, this foundation allows you to understand your space and dictate your story.
Here’s where to begin:
1. Prioritize monitoring generative search
Brand visibility in the AI environment is mission-critical, but it’s also an opaque frontier that requires expertise. It’s not as simple as Googling yourself or your brand; that approach leaves out most of the picture. You need to be able to map the landscape to see the gaps and vulnerabilities, and then take strategic action to solve them.
Generative search monitoring should target your brand name, product categories, and comparisons, as well as high-risk, narrative-damaging information. It reveals the following: if your brand is being included in AI answers, if your assets are used as sources, the accuracy of AI answers, and the sentiment (good, bad, neutral) being shared.
2. Plant seeds in AI’s source material
As discussed earlier, AI search needs sources. It requires material from the web to effectively answer user questions. In the brand context, when AI goes looking and finds negative content or gaps, it tends to output more of the same.
Brands must proactively offer controlled sources by creating targeted content assets that will help AI understand your story across the key search topics (brand name, product categories and comparisons, high-risk info). AI will use these controllable assets for generating answers, creating brand influence over what’s generated.
3. Lead with ORM, not just SEO
If it appears in search, SEO is all that matters, right? Actually, this is no longer the case. Brand visibility success means leaning into online reputation management (ORM) for solutions.
ORM leverages SEO tactics, but it also uses aspects of PR to build a trustworthy reputation across all fronts. Content strategy matters, but so does thought leadership, press mentions, and earned media. Brands need the complete package.
SEO provides search result control, but it does not, on its own, provide all the authority signals your brands need to build or protect your reputation or narrative in AI. The synergistic influence of ORM empowered by generative search monitoring is the solution.
4. Measure influence, not traffic
People rely on AI-generated summaries over actual website content. They get the answers they seek, but may skip your site entirely. That’s why traffic is becoming an irrelevant number for many industries. What matters today is influence.
In AI platforms, influence is a combination of these metrics:
- Visibility — Does your name or brand appear in generative search tools and summaries?
- Citation share — What percentage of brand-related AI answers source content you control?
- Sentiment — What’s the overall perspective on your brand? Positive, negative, or neutral?
- Accuracy — Are AI’s answers aligned with your brand story or reality?
- Consistency — Are you regularly visible, cited, positively portrayed, and accurately described or not?
5. Plug risk frameworks into the generative search context
You are likely operating with risk frameworks in place, but if the AI and generative search environment is excluded, that’s a worrying vulnerability. Brands should enrich their frameworks to include generative search as soon as possible.
Start by answering the most pressing questions:
- What qualifies as a significant misrepresentation that requires action to mitigate brand harm?
- What teams own response and escalation?
- When do we intervene and when do we monitor?
- What are the most important AI platforms to influence?
- How do we address the issues that appear in generative search?
This analysis can help steer your AI risk mitigation efforts and help prioritize action items. This is your initial step.
Take control or be defined
Generative search is no longer a future problem. It is now the front door to your brand. The brands that win will not focus only on rankings or traffic. They will actively shape the source material AI relies on, monitor how they are represented, and treat influence as the core measure of success.
That requires a shift from reactive SEO to proactive reputation management, and from page-one thinking to owning your narrative across the web. The real question is simple: will your brand help define the answers people see, or be defined by them?
