The fundamental equation of search marketing has changed. For years, the goal was simple: get the click. Now, as powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) like Gemini and ChatGPT dominate the answer experience, the customer's job to be done is not just about finding a link. It's about getting an authoritative, instant answer.
Kevin Indig, a respected leader in organic growth strategy, recently delivered a keynote at SEO IRL titled What Works in AI Search. His core insight is transformative: your brand's visibility in the AI landscape is defined by its ability to influence the answer, not just generate traffic.
If your company's information is not referenced in the AI output, you are essentially invisible to the modern user. Here are the seven most critical takeaways from his discussion, designed to help you and your team pivot to an influence-driven strategy.
The old measure of success, which focused solely on organic rankings and raw traffic volume, is insufficient in an era of "zero-click" answers. Your future job to be done is to measure how often your brand shapes the conversational response.
New Key Metric: Brand Reference Share—This is the frequency with which an AI summary or output names your brand as a source.
How to Measure:
Topic Domination: Calculate your brand references $\div$ the total possible references within your key topics.
Top Position Recognition: Track your visibility when your brand is the primary source in an AI Overview or LLM response.
Bot Activity: Analyze your server logs to count the visits from LLM-specific user agents, confirming AI systems are actively fetching your unique data.
Your Action: Develop a reporting dashboard that merges traditional performance data (from tools like Semrush) with these new metrics of AI-layer influence (referencing, sentiment analysis, and crawler hits).
To succeed in AI search is to be designated as a reliable citation. The LLM's central job to be done is to synthesize a complete, reliable, and factually correct answer. This process favors sources that provide rich, verifiable content.
Completeness: Structure your pages to contain high-density facts, comprehensive definitions, and full explanations that AI can incorporate directly into its response.
Reliability: Strengthen your credibility with external affirmations. LLMs value validation from high-trust platforms, including press coverage, customer reviews on YouTube, and discussions on communities like Reddit.
Timeliness: Ensure all figures, screenshots, and examples are up-to-the-minute. Models are designed to favor recent information and will disregard older, unrefreshed material.
Your Action: Construct detailed, fact-packed content hubs and resource pages formatted to be easily extracted and quoted by AI systems.
AI systems reward brands that establish authority through multiple, interconnected proof points across the digital world. They search for validation from various sources to confirm accuracy.
First-Party Evidence: Showcase proprietary data, case studies on customer results, and specialized certifications or patents. Your unique knowledge is your highest form of proof.
Expert Endorsement: Feature recognized industry voices who speak positively about your brand.
User Validation: Highlight customer feedback, analyst quotes, media coverage, and strategic partnerships.
Ecosystem Presence: Maintain constant visibility where purchasing and informational decisions are initiated (comparison sites, Reddit threads, YouTube channels).
Practical Tools: Offer interactive resources or utilities that help the user complete their underlying task directly on your site.
Your Action: Review and publish across all these tiers of validation. Your entire digital footprint must serve as a united authority signal.
LLMs tailor their source selection based on the user's underlying goal, or their job to be done. Indig outlined four specific user intent profiles you must address:
Efficiency Focus: The user seeks an immediate fact or solution and wants the query resolved quickly. The strategic response is to ensure your content is structured for rapid retrieval through factual snippets and schema markup.
Trust Priority: The user needs to confirm the safety, validity, or importance of a major decision. The strategic response is to emphasize your sourcing, expert endorsements, and third-party references.
AI Skepticism: This user is hesitant about the AI's summarized answer and wants to consult traditional, human-reviewed sources. The strategic response is to highlight your brand's authority and link to reliable, non-commercial domains like government or academic sites.
Comparison Mode: The user is actively comparing options or alternatives. The strategic response is to create detailed, data-driven comparison pages that serve as a comprehensive evaluation guide.
Your Action: Categorize your content based on these four user intent profiles and analyze which type of intent is leading to the highest rate of brand citation.
Studies confirm that LLMs and AI Overviews pull information from more than just the standard search engine results pages (SERPs). These external channels represent high-trust environments where customers often begin their research.
Key Community: Reddit is now reported to be a significant citation source for LLMs, frequently appearing as the second most referenced site for specific informational queries.
Visual Medium: YouTube is the dominant platform for visual evidence, heavily indexed for product reviews, tutorials, and practical guides.
Your Action: Use tools to identify which high-trust communities are most relevant to your audience. Contribute or place expert content there, and then track the visibility of those external platforms in the resulting AI summaries.
To be chosen as a dependable source, your facts must be uniform across every point of presence. The AI model's goal is to construct a unified truth about your brand from the available web data.
Ensure all content is published under the names of credible authors with verifiable expertise.
Prominently display customer success stories and third-party validations on your pages.
Verify that your core facts, figures, and definitions are identical across all channels: your website, press releases, and social media.
Your Action: Implement a "Source of Truth" document—a single layer that governs all your brand's key data points across the web, making the model's retrieval process seamless.
This necessary strategic shift requires executive alignment. You must help leadership understand that the rules of success have changed.
Guide leadership away from the formula "search rank $\rightarrow$ website clicks" toward the new reality of "brand citation $\rightarrow$ industry influence."
Integrate traditional metrics (like click-through rates) with new AI performance indicators (brand reference share, LLM sentiment). Research indicates that while traffic may drop for some questions, the quality of traffic referred from AI citations is higher.
Your Action: Include an AI Visibility Scorecard slide in every performance report. This simple measure quantifies your brand's influence and helps leadership understand the value of this strategic investment.
In AI Search, achieving visibility is not about a click; it’s about being the trusted source cited within the authoritative answer. If you need help executing this transition, ContextProof works with brands like yours to ensure their information is accurately and prominently featured when customers query major LLMs such as Gemini and ChatGPT.
We manage the ultimate job to be done for you: We guarantee your proprietary data, unique value, and authority are integrated, verified, and cited across the generative AI ecosystem.
Don't let your traffic vanish; secure your influence and future-proof your visibility today.
Learn more about how ContextProof can get your brand cited in the top LLMs.