How AI and Branded Search Are Rewriting Demand Gen
What if the most important part of your funnel happens before anyone even sees your content?
Well, this is exactly what’s happening. 😅
LLMs are summarizing vendor options in seconds, and nearly half of Google searches already include a brand name. This means the old playbook of optimize, rank, and convert is breaking down and the rules of demand generation are shifting.
If your strategy still revolves around showing up in generic search, this article is for you. I walk you through why brand recall matters more than ever, and how to build the kind of brand that your audience thinks of before they open the tab.
Reality Check: Half of Google Searches Are Branded
The massive Ahrefs study of over 150 million US keywords unearths a wild stat: 45.7% of Google searches are branded. Not a category. Not a question. A brand. This means nearly half the time, people already know who they’re looking for before they even start typing. When this is the case, ranking for generic terms doesn’t matter nearly as much.
Brand search isn’t just a signal, it’s intent. A trust marker. But the trust doesn’t come from one perfectly optimized landing page. Instead, it’s built in moments: the tone in your emails, the delivery of your product, the ease of returning it, the way you explain what you do without sounding like everyone else.
People don’t always choose the best product, they choose the one they already recognize, the one that shows up so consistently they can’t forget it. On top of that, when discovery is outsourced to machines and decisions happen before the click, the only brand that wins is the one already known.
Being remembered > Ranking
Share of Search: What People Actually Remember
Share of search (SoS) isn’t some dashboard filler, it’s a real-time signal of whether your brand is sticking and if people actually think of you when it counts.
Ahrefs breaks it down with a few smart ways to use SoS in the wild:
Test your message: If branded searches go up before revenue does, your positioning is landing, even if sales haven’t caught up yet.
Spot momentum: Tracking SoS alongside brand campaigns shows whether your message is sticking.
Keep an eye on your competitors: Watch their share rise or fall. See where you’re gaining ground or where you need to step it up.
Track lift over time: A rising share over time confirms campaign originality and reach. It shows your brand building real traction, not just traffic spikes.
Put simply, SoS doesn’t just show how you’re doing today, it shows if you’re being remembered. If you’ll be the name buyers are likely to type in when it’s time to choose.
AI Overviews Are Changing the Game
AI-powered summaries now show up in 1 out of 8 searches, and, when they do, clicks drop by more than a third. So we’re not just dealing with less traffic in this new search landscape, we’re dealing with fewer chances to even be considered.
Ahrefs dug into 75,000 brands to figure out what actually gets you featured in an AI Overview, and it’s not what old-school SEO taught us:
Branded web mentions had the strongest correlation at 0.664
Branded anchor text: Correlation of 0.527
Branded search volume: Correlation of 0.392
Traditional link metrics barely move the needle
This tells us that brand matters more than backlinks. You can’t keyword-hack your way into AI visibility. You need people talking about you, linking to you by name. Searching for you directly. If you’re not being mentioned, you’re invisible… no matter how good your domain authority looks.
It also means that content and PR need to work from the same brand foundation rather than in isolation. In practice, this involves shifting focus from individual keywords to the specific questions your audience is asking, and providing complete, authoritative answers. That might mean restructuring core pages and blog posts so they’re organized around questions, adding clear FAQs, including author bios to establish credibility, and using schema markup to help AI models understand and surface your content.
Structured data now plays a similar role to meta descriptions in traditional SEO: it signals context and meaning so both humans and machines can quickly identify what a page offers. This approach moves optimization from being purely about “rankable” pages to creating content that is easily “retrievable” in answer engines.
Brand Moves Through Models, Not Just Media
Researching vendors used to mean opening up an Excel spreadsheet—vendors in Column A, notes for your boss in Column B. Maybe a few open tabs, a call with sales, some back-and-forth in email. Now, LLMs summarize vendor research while you make a cup of tea.
This is a massive shift because in the “old world,” content gave you a fighting chance. You could optimize a blog post, target long-tail keywords, win on technical SEO. Even if no one knew who you were, you could show up.
Not anymore. You can still create amazing content and earn top rankings, but the traffic payoff isn’t what it used to be.
AI doesn’t rank you, it recalls you.
In the AI-first world, you’re not showing up unless the model already knows you. If your brand isn’t mentioned across the web—on podcasts, in third-party articles, in LinkedIn comments, in newsletter roundups—you’re not in the dataset. If you’re not in the dataset, you’re not on the shortlist.
LLMs are making the dark funnel even darker. Buyers are building full vendor lists without ever landing on your site. They’re asking ChatGPT, checking Slack threads, and validating with friends. Then they search for brands by name.
The journey used to be linear:
Problem → Research → Compare → Choose
Now it’s compressed and decentralized:
Prompt → Peer validation → Brand search → Decision
As I wrote in GEO and the New Shape of PR, this changes everything about visibility.
If you can't win on clicks, you win on trust. You need to be top of mind, yes, but you also need to be indexed across trusted sources: frequently mentioned, clearly described, and consistently positioned across the open web. You need to be mentioned in the places people (and machines) look. Otherwise, the model has no memory of you, and no reason to retrieve your name.
This is why we’re seeing a new wave of SEO content focused on awareness, credibility, and context, not just demand capture. Because getting your brand to appear on ChatGPT isn’t the same as getting it to show up on Google.
Google ranks results and ChatGPT summarizes options based on context. That means people aren’t just searching “best financial reporting software,” they’re asking for “the best option for a non-technical founder at a pre-seed startup with one part-time bookkeeper.” Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) content gives AI what it needs to recognize, recall, and recommend your brand.
One overlooked advantage in the AI era: speed. While traditional SEO can take weeks to reward an update, AI models can incorporate refreshed content within days (or even hours) if it’s already in their training and retrieval set. That means regularly revisiting and updating your most brand-defining content isn’t just good housekeeping, it’s a way to influence how you’re represented in AI answers almost in real time. In practice, this means keeping high-intent, high-visibility pages on a short refresh cycle, replacing outdated stats, and reinforcing your positioning so the latest version of your story is the one machines remember.
Content, PR, and the Brand That Holds It All Together
If your content and PR strategies are still running on separate tracks, you're missing the point. They don’t just need to align, they need to reinforce each other.
One story, told well, should echo across your blog, your pitch deck, your media coverage, and your sales emails. (Not because you're repeating yourself, but because you're reinforcing what matters.)
Here's what that looks like in practice:
New and earned media move together. A single campaign gets repurposed (e.g., into articles, interviews, social posts, founder quotes, etc.) extending reach without diluting the impact.
Tone and creative stay tight. Whether it’s a paid ad, a podcast snippet, or a quote in Wired, it all sounds like you.
Trust is built through repetition. AI models don’t need shiny, they need recognizable. If your name, message, and positioning show up the same way everywhere, you’re training the model (and your market) to remember you.
Without a consistent brand throughline, none of it works. The content doesn’t land and the clicks don’t convert. BRAND ISN’T THE POLISH, IT’S THE GLUE.
(Again, well-structured BOFU content that targets how people actually search still matters. These pages help models, and buyers, see where you fit, especially when they’re making category-level decisions. For a deeper dive, check out How to Write for LLMs: Lessons from a Content Marketer.)
Why This Changes Everything About Demand Gen
Here’s the shift plain and simple:
Brand isn’t a bonus, it’s the prerequisite. If an AI doesn’t recognize you, your buyer probably won’t either.
Community and earned presence matter more than ever. AI and humans are looking for the same clues: Are you being talked about in places that carry weight? Are people mentioning you without being paid to?
Your website isn’t the start of the journey, it’s the confirmation. By the time someone lands on your site, the decision is halfway made. They’ve already asked ChatGPT, checked Slack, and talked to a peer. They're not browsing, they’re validating.
The brands breaking through right now aren’t the loudest or most optimized. They’re just already known.
They don’t:
Chase each category keyword
Gate content for leads they’ll never close
They do:
Build familiarity across channels
Show up the same way everywhere
Make it easy for both humans and machines to say: “I know this brand. I trust them.”
The Context Has Changed. Your Strategy Should Too.
Marketing has never just been about grabbing attention, it’s always been about being liked, trusted, and remembered. Connection, not just content volume, builds lasting awareness.
Brand never stopped being important, but the playing field has changed. Today’s buyer journey is fragmented, AI-filtered, and mostly invisible, and it starts well before anyone visits your website.
By the time someone lands on your page (if they do), they’ve already asked a model, checked in with their network, and searched by name. If your strategy still hinges on capturing anonymous traffic, you’re solving for the wrong moment.
The brands gaining ground now aren’t optimizing pages, they’re building presence in the places people and machines both rely on. This isn’t about chasing clicks, it’s about being remembered before the search ever happens.