Brand Awareness & Search in the age of AI

This post was originally published on my LinkedIn.

You can’t search for something if you don’t know it exists.

You can’t proactively drive users to something if they are not aware of it.

It’s not SEO’s place to drive awareness.

Well, sure…but also, maybe not so much, anymore?

To be part of the awareness phase in SEO, you will typically have to rank your site and keywords for non-brand, or what I like to call ‘brand adjacent’ searches - AKA: not Brand X+Product-Name, just Product-Name Trail Running Shoes or Product-Type Trail Running Shoes.

Of course, the greatest struggle for most SEOs is competing with pretty much everyone else in the results for any kind of non-brand visibility. In an age where AI-powered search results are growing across platforms, from Bing’s CoPilot to Google’s AI Overviews and even others beyond search engines, we are discovering opportunities to not simply react as a channel, but grab attention by showing up in the conversation early–in the “most upper” of Upper Funnels there is.

Studies by seoClarity by Mark Traphagen have continually shown the growth, and decline, and growth again, of AI Overviews in results across industries over last year. In another recent piece by Seer Interactive by Wil Reynolds and Tracy McDonald, the appearance of AIO directly (and STRONGLY) impacts both Paid and Organic positioning along with CTR. This means it is now more important than ever to build a strong awareness approach when planning your brand’s content strategy, even–and especially–when it comes to Organic Search visibility.

This can sometimes feel like a conflict of interest in the hearts and minds of SEOs, since the more space you own at the top of SERPs with AI Overview will most likely drive less conversions to your site.

But whether you are a new, niche, or established brand, awareness is pivotal; brand recall is a key element of advertising since time immemorial. The "billboard theory" suggests that messaging needs to be simple yet impactful enough to be understood within 3 seconds.

Having a brand name appear at the top of the SERP in AI results meets the user where they are–essentially the 2025 version of such an approach. Increased visibility begets recall and leads to improved brand awareness. This may not always result in a ‘click’ or conversion straight out–in fact these ‘zero-click’ results have become increasingly more common: upwards of 58% in 2024. However, it showcases brand messaging in the earliest stage of a conversation, increasing the likelihood of consideration.

Now what are we as SEOs supposed to tell our brands, our channel partners, our engineers, and our content counterparts?

The approach is a mix of our traditional SEO (keyword-enriched content strategies) and opening up to new content types; an understanding of SEO being a part of other channels and sitting alongside CRO, Paid Search messaging, and overall website experience, along with the ability to support or influence Social or Video campaigns. The end goal is high-quality, credible content that speaks directly to what users are asking, what information they need, when they are seeking it - along with an understanding of how and where that content is delivered (on or off-site, visual or text-based, etc.) and most importantly, who else is appearing in that result space.

How do we better understand audience awareness in the age of zero-clicks and fluctuating SERPs? One key area is the growth of Q&A style responses – and filling in gaps quickly. AEO or ‘Answer Engine Optimization’ is becoming one common approach. We research those long-tail, thought-out questions that users are asking in Search, Discussion forms and LLMs. We then directly answer those questions in various formats both on-and-off-site: Text-base site pieces, YouTube videos, Partner sites with backlink potential. All of this builds notoriety, which helps the Large Language Models that power AI results perceive a brand in a positive, authoritative light.

Understanding how a brand, product or service is seen by these LLMs can be investigated with a number of tools, or just by having a ‘discussion’ with ChatGPT or Gemini. At Jellyfish, we utilize Share of Model, which queries all the latest LLMs with relevant prompts about a brand and its audience, tracking how these models consider that data to uncover the best messaging opportunities and content for optimization. It can overlay social sentiment, search, and commerce data to ground AI findings in actionable insights. This is key is gaining the ‘trust’ of Large Language Models and helping brands win awareness and recall.

Given what we’ve seen over the last year of the rollout of AI, I believe this new era of the Organic Landscape will enable SEOs to join the strategic process at the earliest stages of planning for brands and campaigns.