What To Do When AI-Based Search Affects Your Brand
AI is transforming the search engine experience. With LLMs increasingly providing search results that displace the contents of traditional search engine results pages (SERPs), many search marketers are struggling to stay visible.
AI-based search also affects brand reputations, as LLMs answer questions about brands with detailed, nuanced responses that incorporate new sources of brand feedback. This trend is driven by changes in the search algorithm and the indexing of a broader data set. As a result, search is now more relevant to your brand image than ever before. This article explores why this is happening and what you can do to protect your brand in this new era of LLM search.
Why Is AI Affecting My Organic Search Traffic?
AI may be negatively affecting your organic search traffic volume for several reasons. For one thing, at least 15% of searches are now returning AI Summaries, which take over the key "real estate" at the top of the SERP and push traditional, ranked search results further down, where they may not be seen. AI Summaries contain full text responses to search queries, with snippets of text containing links. These snippets link to different sites from those featured in equivalent top-ranked organic search results.
Click-through is less common in AI search, too, though data suggests that engagement is higher for users who click through to a site included in a snippet. Additionally, a small but growing percentage of people are bypassing traditional search engines altogether and asking their queries directly to LLMs. This practice further diminishes organic search traffic.
How Can I Make My Website Appear More Often in LLM Searches?
There are ways to make your website appear more frequently on LLM searches, though the techniques are new, evolving, and not as well understood as traditional SEO methods. Some experts hold that regular SEO, as practiced, will help your site rank in LLM search. This may not always be the case, but the suggestion is to avoid abandoning SEO just because LLM search is emerging as an alternative.
Another method for ranking in LLM search is to create content that contains passages, i.e., textual snippets, that are optimized for LLM queries and the LLM's digital reasoning processes. This is different from traditional SEO. To take a simple example, if you need a lawyer, a conventional search engine would prioritize a site optimized for a query like "I need a lawyer in Houston." In contrast, to optimize a passage for an LLM, you need to anticipate the LLM's digital reasoning chain, e.g., "I need a lawyer" triggers the query, "Are you being sued?" or "Have you been in an accident?" and so forth. The LLM-optimized content should address those derivative queries.
Why Does My Brand Look Bad in LLM Search?
If you type a query about your brand into an LLM, you might get an unpleasant surprise. ChatGPT or Anthropic might tell you, "Customers have mixed feelings about [your brand] due to frequent complaints about [Issues]." Uh-oh. This is not what you want to be seeing, but it's out there. All that investment in brand is starting to go sideways. What's happening?
There's no simple answer to this question, but a big factor here is the way that LLM's learn about your brand. They dig deeper and more broadly into online sources of information about your brand. These include social media, review sites, Reddit, and more.
Keep in mind that the LLM doesn't actually know anything about your brand, or indeed what a brand even is. However, LLMs are very good at compiling data from diverse sources and synthesizing an accurate text description of what they find. This will include any negative feedback about your brand in the digital universe. For a variety of reasons, negative brand feedback is less prevalent in traditional search, so it has not been a major priority until now. This is partly due to a narrower indexing of online data that the algorithm uses to create traditional SERPs.
What Can I Do to Fix My Brand's Reputation in AI-Based Search?
It is possible to repair your brand reputation as it surfaces in AI-driven search. The first step is to assess how your brand is characterized by LLMs. By using purpose-built tools like Whitebox, this process should reveal specific weak spots in your brand that require proactive remediation. For example, LLM search may return results that describe your brand as embodying "poor customer support." If this is true, then there's no substitute for actually improving your customer support. However, you can take immediate action by publishing content that refutes the negative feedback, e.g., blog posts that contain examples of positive customer support experiences. This has to be done at scale, which again requires specialized tooling. Whitebox has the ability to remediate brand image for AI search at scale.
Conclusion
AI is affecting search, potentially pushing down organic search traffic. Traditional SEO is not dead, but is arguably less relevant today, with LLMs using different data sources and algorithms to generate search results that do more than just rank the top sites for a query. AI-driven search also potentially affects brand reputation because LLMs now create more detailed and nuanced descriptions of brands than traditional search engines. This is a worrisome development, but there are mitigations for the problem.
Don't fall behind your competitors. Many of them are likely employing tools like Whitebox to increase their visibility on LLMs and achieve a branding advantage in this newest competitive venue. With Whitebox, for example, it is possible to assess precisely how LLMs are affecting a brand. Why Whitebox? Whitebox's proprietary, uniquely scalable technology offers a distinctive AI search brand repair process. It's the best platform for LLM brand image management.
