Companies that have grown accustomed to devoting budget, creativity, and effort to where they ranked in Google searches find that today they don’t always know when their brand is surfacing on AI platforms. The old search engine optimization (SEO) goals of rank high, get the click, and tell your story are shifting to measures of generative engine optimization (GEO).

As search and brand experience move in-line with agentic conversations and GenAI begins to disintermediate brands from their customers, many are asking the same question: What happens when your app (or website) is no longer the front door to your product or service?

It’s natural to focus on the risks of this new world, but companies would be well served to also recognize the enormous opportunities. Rapid shifts in both the market and technology are creating a divide between companies that are winning at AI and those that are lagging.

This is not a moment to be constrained by generative AI but to use it, as leaders already are, to reimagine the future. Consider how Spotify is using smart, generative, emotionally tuned AI to transform your listening habits into a story about you. That’s not just a better user interface; it’s an AI-driven redefinition of what its brand is—from music library to taste curator, from service provider to identity mirror.

Consumer behavior is shifting

Building brands for the agentic world requires that companies face three challenging realities:

• Consumers are finding what they need in summaries and other AI-powered sources, and they are decreasingly likely to click through to brand websites—a trend that is accelerating (see Figure 1).
• Different data sources and spaces, such as Reddit and YouTube, are informing search today, and many companies have not engineered their websites to be accessible to bots thirsty for information about their brand (see Figure 2).
• It’s often unclear who is responsible for adapting to and making the most of this shift. When the Marketing AI Institute asked members “who owns AI adoption and integration in marketing,” the top three survey answers were the CEO, the CMO, and no one.

Figure 1

Figure 2

From search to selection, consumer interaction with brands is increasingly happening through summary and suggestion, often in a conversation you don’t even know your brand is in. Alphabet now has 75 million daily users in “AI Mode” in 40 languages. Bain research has found that, while searching online, up to 45% of shoppers already use GenAI tools to compare products and that a significant chunk complete purchases with agentic assistance.

As companies struggle to know if their brands are turning up where they need to, tools that track and shape brand presence on agentic platforms have rapidly proliferated. RankPrompt, SpyFu, Peec AI, and “Am I On AI?” are all part of a quickly evolving landscape.

What if people never see your app?

Companies have spent the past decade building their brand by focusing on their own website, app, and content ecosystem driven by well-understood search and social funnels, both of which are now disrupted. So, what can companies do now that customers’ research and increasingly their purchase decisions are made in an AI-powered chat? Or by agents themselves?

In the early 20^th century, mass manufacturing disconnected consumers from products’ origins, and branding emerged to build trust and help consumers choose amid overwhelming options. Now, as AI disconnects consumers from traditional paths to purchase, branding must evolve again—this time for a world of conversations and summaries. Brands are shortcuts in decision making, and now that bots can be decision makers, too, the role that brands play will evolve. Bots will rely on different things to make a product recommendation or choice than a human customer does.

As information is fed into large language models (LLMs) and consumers have conversations with them in lieu of search, shoppers are relying on a new form of aggregation in which they know less about where the data or answer is coming from. If I can have a chat to find a new refrigerator, I might not need to ever step foot in a store. But without the retailer’s backing and expertise, brands become that much more important.

Three horizons to consider for meeting customers where your brand shows up now

Companies hoping to use GenAI to invent must quickly turn to the task at hand—that is, being present in the places where agents look, answering the questions that people ask, and earning their place in the summary.

As the places where companies tell their brand story shifts to spaces in which they have less control, reviews become really important. If you have negative reviews, you need to find a way to reverse them, and quickly.

This shift can feel daunting, but opportunities also abound. There are three horizons to consider as companies embark on this change: tuning your brand for agentic platforms, releasing yourself from the spaces your brand had previously occupied, and imagining new possibilities that couldn’t be achieved before.

Tune your brand for agentic platforms. This is about optimization—namely, doing what’s required to show up, clearly and credibly, in agentic interfaces today. Focus on five things:

• Shift your key performance indicators. Move from SEO metrics such as click-through and bounce rates to GEO goals such as “win the agent output” and agent win rates.
• Make your content agent readable. LLMs reward clarity and credibility. Your brand language should be concise, benefit-led, and evidence-backed. In a world of agentic commerce in which AI systems mediate consumer choices, trust shifts from being a feeling about a brand to an attribute of its data.
• Design for summarization. Summaries, shorthand for all manner of compressed agent outputs from short lists to comparison tables, are becoming a sort of storefront. Use clear, customer-centric language to survive agent compression, summary, and rewording. Anticipate the questions agents are likely to be asked, and frame product content in terms of benefits and emotions, not just specs and features.
• Prepare for agentic ads. Generative AI platforms are starting to toll out ad offerings. If these follow a similar path to search advertising, these are likely to be based on both bid and relevance or quality signals. Start preparing your measurement, guardrails, and creative formats.
• Continue to focus on accuracy. Agents misstating price, availability, return policy, or safety can pose a real risk to a brand. Companies can’t abandon verification and governance. Key defenses include verified specs and policies, canonical sources, monitoring for misstatements, and escalation processes.

Leading brands aren’t waiting; they are adapting. Walmart, for example, is experimenting with agentic strategies both within its own ecosystems and in third-party platforms. It’s built tools such as Sparky, an AI shopping assistant on the Walmart app that helps shoppers find what they need, reorder, and get information. Amazon’s Rufus, a similar AI assistant, was used by more than 250 million customers last year, according to the company, and its users are more than 60% more likely to convert to a sale.

In addition to building its own tools, Walmart has partnered with OpenAI to make it possible to shop for Walmart products within ChatGPT.

Release yourself from the spaces your brand had previously occupied. Start with portability, but carefully select what you share and how you define your brand on agentic services.

• Make identities portable. In agent user interfaces, brands appear as a chip, card, or in-line bullet. Define systems that read at these smaller resolutions.
• Move defining features into agentic surfaces, but find the right walls and edges. Port features that define the brand into new conversations, but think carefully about which features to wall off in order to bring customers into the experiences and properties you own.
• Define your brand in new places. Invest in open conversation and third-party references. Maintain a factual presence in these communities.

Imagine new possibilities that couldn’t be achieved before. Let’s step out of the panic zone and into the space of possibility. Which opportunities might an agentic world provide for a brand to serve a different role or deliver a new value proposition to customers?

• Could you solve new problems for customers by breaking old standards of personalization and service?
• Could you step beyond the core brand value proposition by changing the role that your brand plays in people’s lives?
• Could you learn at agentic speed? When you can’t watch users click through your site, build synthetic audiences—that is, AI-generated proxies built from behavioral and review data—to simulate how people think and choose.

• Could you think about how your brand works in other ecosystems—perhaps with brands or in channels you never considered before?

It’s easy to forget that AI has been here for a long time. Long before today’s generative AI boom, brands were using versions of AI to boost their connection to customers, even creating entirely new experiences and products. That’s how Spotify’s Wrapped became a year-end highlight, with screenshots flooding group chats and social feeds. It’s how Sephora used facial recognition and skin tone analysis to move from simply selling makeup to being a personal makeup artist. It’s how Netflix analyzes viewing patterns and designs hit shows.

Spotify, Sephora, Netflix—they didn’t just plug in AI to drive efficiency; they used it to shift the very role their brands play in people’s lives.

Brave new brand

Brands have been declared endangered by technology many times. When customer relationship management systems took hold and again when price bots were introduced, many rang the death knell for brands. Yet they are as important today as they have ever been. Rather than a time for hand-wringing, use this as a moment to consider what your brand could be that it’s not today. Explore strategies to not only make sure that people can find your brand in this new world but also use this technology to expand the aperture of what your brand can be.

The smartest brands won’t just survive the shift to GenAI; they’ll reimagine themselves for it.