Optimising Your Brand for AI Search: Strategies for 2025 and Beyond

Brand optimisation for AI search means ensuring your brand gets mentioned and recommended when buyers ask ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, or Perplexity questions about your category. With 800 million people now using ChatGPT weekly and AI Overviews appearing in up to 30% of Google searches, B2B brands invisible to AI face a structural disadvantage that traditional SEO cannot fix.

The shift is profound: AI systems don't use backlinks to determine credibility. They use brand mentions—how frequently and positively your brand appears across trusted sources. Research shows mentions correlate with AI visibility at approximately 0.65, whilst backlinks show neutral or weak impact. For B2B SaaS Marketing Directors struggling to prove marketing ROI, this represents both a challenge and an opportunity to outpace competitors still focused solely on traditional search.

AI search has become a primary brand discovery channel

The scale of AI search adoption has exceeded even bullish predictions. ChatGPT reached 800-900 million weekly active users by late 2025, processing over 2 billion daily queries—roughly 10% of Google's daily search volume. Google AI Overviews now appear in 16-30% of US desktop searches, up 475% on mobile since September 2024. Perplexity processes 780 million queries monthly.

More importantly, AI search visitors convert at 4.4× higher rates than traditional search traffic. These aren't casual browsers—they're buyers who've received an AI endorsement of your brand before clicking through. At Whitehat, we've seen AI-referred traffic consistently outperform organic on engagement metrics across our client base.

What makes AI systems recommend your brand

AI engines don't use traditional SEO signals. Research from Seer Interactive found backlinks have neutral or weak impact on AI visibility, whilst brand mentions showed strong correlation with appearing in AI answers. As Rand Fishkin puts it: "The currency of large language models is not links. The currency is mentions—specifically, words that appear frequently near other words across the training data."

Princeton University's GEO research identified specific tactics that boost AI visibility:

• Adding statistics increases visibility by up to 115% for lower-ranked sites
• Including expert quotations delivers 15-30% visibility improvement
• Citing credible sources enhances perceived authority
• Clear, fluent writing improves AI parsing and extraction

The research also reveals AI's reliance on specific platforms. Wikipedia is ChatGPT's most-cited source at 47.9% of references. G2 captures 22-23% share of voice in AI-generated B2B software responses. Review platforms have become essential infrastructure for AI visibility—something traditional SEO rarely prioritised.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: 26% of brands are completely invisible in ChatGPT responses for their category. With AI answers typically limited to 3-4 brand citations, there's a clear winner-take-all dynamic emerging. The brands building AI visibility now will compound that advantage as AI search adoption accelerates.

Why brand building matters more than ever: the 95-5 rule

The 95-5 rule, developed by Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute with LinkedIn's B2B Institute, fundamentally reframes marketing investment. Their research shows B2B buyers change service providers approximately once every 5 years, meaning only about 20% are in-market annually—and just 5% in any given quarter.

The implications are significant:

• Most of your marketing spend reaches people who won't buy for months or years
• If buyers don't know your brand when they enter the market, it's already too late
• Brand building creates the memory structures that activate when buyers eventually enter the market

Yet 96% of B2B marketers expect to see campaign effects within 2 weeks—a timeline that fundamentally misunderstands how B2B brand building works. This explains why so many HubSpot users we work with struggle to prove marketing ROI: they're measuring short-term metrics whilst brand investment pays off over quarters and years.

The proven economics of brand investment

Les Binet and Peter Field's analysis of 996 IPA Effectiveness case studies established that optimal budget allocation is roughly 60% brand building, 40% activation. For B2B specifically, the split adjusts to approximately 46:54 favouring slightly more activation. Yet most B2B companies currently spend around 30:70 toward demand generation.

The compounding returns from brand investment are substantial:

• Long-term brand investment delivers 2× profit compared to short-term focus
• Emotional advertising is 2× as efficient and delivers 2× the profit of rational messaging
• Brands targeting the whole market achieve 3× more large business effects
• Campaigns generating fame can quadruple marketing budget efficiency

New 2025 IPA research reveals something counterintuitive: budget matters 8× more than ROI for driving effectiveness. ROI accounts for only 11% of variations in profit payback, versus 89% for budget size. This suggests the obsessive focus on proving immediate ROI may actually be undermining marketing effectiveness.

Tactical playbook for AI search optimisation

Based on research from multiple sources, here are the specific tactics Whitehat recommends for improving brand visibility in AI answers:

Content optimisation for AI extraction

Structure content around specific questions your audience asks AI assistants. Provide direct, concise answers in the first 100-200 words—AI systems extract the clearest, most direct responses. Use bullet points, lists, and tables (78% of AI Overviews use lists). Include original research, statistics, and expert quotes that AI can cite.

Platform presence strategy

Wikipedia is non-negotiable: 78.8% of tools mentioned in ChatGPT category queries have Wikipedia pages. For brands not meeting Wikipedia's notability requirements, Wikidata accepts any entity with verifiable references—some companies have gained Knowledge Panels within 7 days of Wikidata entries.

Review platforms matter enormously: G2 is the most visible B2B review platform across AI search, capturing approximately 75% of review-site citations in Perplexity. Focus on review recency (G2 weights reviews 0-90 days most heavily) and encourage detailed, context-rich reviews from satisfied customers.

Technical requirements

• Ensure GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot are NOT blocked in robots.txt
• Implement schema markup (Organisation, FAQ, Product, Article)
• Consider llms.txt—a new standard that acts as a "treasure map" for AI, pointing to your most valuable content
• Use semantic URLs (5-7 descriptive words) which correlate with 11.4% more AI citations

Third-party mentions strategy

Target publications AI already cites—check which sources appear when you search your category in ChatGPT and Perplexity. Reddit discussions carry significant weight for Perplexity; industry publications matter more for ChatGPT. PR becomes less about link-building and more about narrative-building across AI-trusted sources.

How B2B buyers actually research and decide

6sense's 2024 Buyer Experience Report (surveying 2,509 B2B buyers) reveals the scale of pre-sales research:

• 81% have picked a preferred vendor before first sales contact
• 85% have established purchase requirements before reaching out
• 70% of the buying journey happens before engaging sellers
• 78% shortlist only 3 vendors to evaluate deeply

Wynter's 2024 research shows the research sequence: 72% start by asking trusted peers, then 54% use review sites to validate recommendations, then 51% go to Google to verify further. AI search is inserting itself into this sequence—when buyers ask ChatGPT "what's the best CRM for a 50-person SaaS company?", they're forming preferences before traditional search even happens.

This means brands must be in the consideration set before buyers begin active research. If you're not being recommended by AI assistants, you're not making the shortlist.

Frequently asked questions

What B2B marketers should do now

The fundamentals of brand science—mental availability, distinctive assets, long-term investment compounding—have become more important as AI mediates brand discovery. The shift isn't from brand building to performance marketing; it's from brand awareness to brand availability across AI systems.

First, accept that AI search optimisation is no longer optional. With 30% of Google searches showing AI Overviews and 800 million ChatGPT users, brands invisible to AI face structural disadvantage.

Second, rebalance toward brand investment. Real-world 30:70 demand-weighted budgets contradict effectiveness research. The 95-5 rule means most of your spend reaches future buyers—brand building is the only way to capture that future value.

Third, build for consistency. AI forms recommendations based on digital consensus. Identical positioning across your website, Wikipedia, G2, LinkedIn, and industry publications signals "high-confidence" information to AI systems.

Fourth, invest in content that AI can cite. Thought leadership, original research, and comprehensive guides drive trust, differentiation, and increasingly, AI citations. The quality bar is low—only 15% of B2B thought leadership is rated excellent—creating opportunity for brands willing to invest in substance.

The brands that will dominate AI recommendations are those building mental availability now, before their competitors recognise the shift. At Whitehat, we help B2B companies build this foundation through integrated SEO, content strategy, and AI search optimisation—all connected to HubSpot for clear attribution and ROI visibility.

References & further reading

1. TechCrunch: Sam Altman says ChatGPT has hit 800M weekly active users (October 2025)
2. LinkedIn B2B Institute: The 95-5 Rule
3. Marketing Week: The 95:5 rule is the new 60:40 rule (April 2024)
4. Marketing Week: Only 15% of brand assets are 'truly distinctive', study finds
5. LinkedIn B2B Institute: How B2B Brands Grow
6. Search Engine Land: llms.txt isn't robots.txt: It's a treasure map for AI
7. IPA: Effectiveness Research
8. Gartner: The Adaptability Era: 3 Marketing Trends Reshaping B2B Growth

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