Search has changed, yet most agencies are still optimising for 2019.

Ask ChatGPT to recommend a supplier. Ask Perplexity to compare two products. Ask Google a question and read the answer at the top of the page without clicking anything. This is how a growing share of your customers now research, compare and decide. The front door to your market has moved, and most marketing agencies are still knocking on the old one.

The numbers are not subtle. OpenAI reported 900 million people using ChatGPT every week by February 2026, and the app passed a billion monthly users in June. Google’s AI Overviews, the answer box that sits above the blue links, now reaches around 2.5 billion people a month, and its conversational AI Mode has crossed a billion monthly users of its own. In the United States, roughly two in three Google searches now end without a single click to an outside website. People get their answer on the results page, or from an assistant, and move on.

For brands, that reframes the whole question. It is no longer only do we rank? It is when an AI answers a question we should own, does it mention us?

Why most agencies have not caught up

For twenty years, content marketing meant one playbook. Publish blog posts. Fit in the keywords. Build some backlinks. Wait for Google to send traffic. It worked well enough that most agencies never had a reason to change it, and plenty are still selling it today.

That playbook is now optimising for a search engine that increasingly answers the question itself. Thin, generic, keyword-led content is exactly the material an AI summarises and replaces. When the answer appears on the page, the ten-blue-links model that funded a generation of SEO pays out less. The habit is hard to break because the invoices still look the same. The results underneath them do not.

What actually wins now

The mechanics have changed. The principle has not. AI systems build their answers from sources they judge to be authoritative, well-structured and worth citing. Being cited is the new being ranked. The commercial case is already in the data: brands that appear inside AI answers are seeing markedly higher click-through than those left out, on both organic and paid results. Visibility inside the answer now matters more than position beneath it.

Two things earn that visibility. The first is technical: content an AI can actually read and trust. Structured data and schema markup, clean content architecture, an llms.txt file that tells language models what your business does and stands for. The second is editorial, and it is the part most agencies find harder. AI rewards content that works as a primary source. Original arguments, specific evidence, a real point of view. The safe, committee-approved article that offends nobody and says nothing is invisible to a model looking for something worth quoting.

This is where our own thinking gives clients an edge. The content that gets read, shared and cited is content that works with human nature rather than against it. Status, tribe, novelty; the innate drives that make people stop and pay attention have not changed because the interface did. A model surfaces content that people engage with, and people engage with content that says something. Insight, not filler.

What brands should be doing now

Start with an honest audit. Where does your brand show up in Google today, and where does it show up when someone asks an AI the questions that matter in your category? Most brands have never looked, and the gap is usually wider than they expect.

Then rebuild for both. Get the technical foundations in place so AI systems can read and cite you. Shift the content mix away from the generic informational posts AI now answers for free, and towards the commercial, comparative, evidence-led material that is harder to synthesise and closer to a decision. Above all, write with a point of view. Then measure what counts: visibility that turns into enquiries and revenue, not traffic for its own sake.

The window is open, briefly

Here is the opportunity. In the UK, AI search is largely unclaimed. The big SEO firms are still chasing traditional rankings. The content shops are still producing the posts they have produced for a decade. Very few have started building for where search has actually gone.

That will not last. Establish your brand as the authoritative source in your category now, before your competitors wake up to the shift, and the advantage compounds. Wait, and you will spend next year buying back ground you could have held for free.

We build content and AI search strategies for exactly this moment. See how we approach content, editorial and AI discoverability, or get in touch and we will tell you where your brand stands today.