It’s no secret that the web is undergoing some major shifts. Standing out in an AI world might feel like going head-to-head with robots (literally).
From Google’s new “AI Mode” to agentic large language models (LLMs), the nature of web search and discovery is changing rapidly. Not only has AI adoption outpaced early mobile phone adoption, OpenAI (the creators of ChatGPT) recently surpassed 400 million weekly active users!
The trend is clear: a new web is emerging.
It’s an AI-powered web where people have access to hyperintelligent generative AI assistants that can analyze websites, recommend products, and answer informational queries with ease.
As a result, brands are seeing their organic traffic decline as fewer searches result in a click-through to a website. Content that once drove top-of-the-funnel traffic has become irrelevant, traditional SEO tactics no longer yield results, and it’s harder than ever to stand out amid a sea of AI-generated content.
Your marketing playbook needs an upgrade. Welcome to my practical playbook for marketers in an AI world.
Before we dive in, a quick note: this isn’t a definitive forecast. While the reflections here are grounded in recent research, they’re also shaped by my experience as a marketer and my take on emerging trends. Consider this one perspective on where things might be headed in the world of AI, search, and content, not the final word.
Thriving in Chaos
Things are chaotic right now. The search landscape seems to change every day. New tools are constantly emerging. And to top it all off—there’s no shortage of bad marketing advice out there.
But in this chaos lies opportunity. As web discovery evolves, consumer expectations change accordingly. Marketers that adapt quickest are well poised to benefit from these changes.
The key to success? Tuning out the noise, ignoring cheap tactics that will only work in the short term, understanding how LLMs operate, and returning to solid marketing fundamentals.
Producing quality content, building trust, optimizing for discoverability, owning your channels, and driving action through coherent and clear messaging that speaks directly to your target audience. In my opinion, that’s how you win.
How To Get Ahead in the Era of AI Dominance
Let’s take a look at what you can start doing right now to build a solid foundation and align your marketing with the demands of the AI-powered web.
We’ll cover seven actionable tactics that we’re doing to stand out in an AI world and get your marketing playbook rolling.
1. Optimize Your Website
Despite all the changes we’ve seen, we believe SEO fundamentals are still important. The more things change, the more they stay the same!
Start by checking your robots.txt file to ensure your site isn’t blocking LLMs. If ChatGPT or Claude can’t see your content, they’ll never mention or cite you in their responses.
Next, audit your site’s URLs to ensure that all your important pages are indexable by search engines (Gemini searches the web via Google’s index, and ChatGPT and Copilot pull from Bing’s index). That leads to another key point: Ensure your site is being indexed by Bing. If you haven’t set up Bing Webmaster Tools yet, now’s the time!
You also need to check your site for broken links, 404 errors, and redirect loops. Fixing these issues improves crawlability, information retrieval, and UX. Use tools like Screaming Frog to do the “heavy lifting” here.
Screen capture of the Screaming Frog front end by the author.
Finally, implement schema-structured data for all important pages (especially product pages!). Schema markup provides semantic labels for your pages in JSON-LD format and helps LLMs and search engines understand your content and brand. SEO plugins like Yoast add this for you automatically, and you can validate the output by using Google’s rich results testing tool.
And as things continue to change and evolve, it’s important to stay agile and be ready to act.
For example, llms.txt is a proposed standard that points LLMs to your most important content (kind of like a treasure map). While no AIs are using this file today, that doesn’t mean they won’t in the future. Start thinking about this now and have a plan to create one if/when the need arises.
2. Optimize Your Content
LLMs process language more like humans than traditional algorithms. Instead of relying on exact keyword matches, they interpret meaning through context and semantic relationships. Keep this in mind when writing articles, H1s (top-level headings), meta descriptions, and anchor text. Clarity and relevance matter more than keywords.
While crafting high-quality content is a topic worthy of its own article (if not an entire book!), here are four key principles to keep in mind:
- Readability: Short paragraphs help make your content more readable to humans and LLMs. Proper heading structures, bullet lists, and FAQs aid in extractability for AI answers.
- Freshness: According to AirOps, content freshness is highly correlated to AI citation presence. Make sure you’re updating those old blog posts, docs, and landing pages with the latest information.
- Brand alignment: Ensure your content is telling a consistent story, use consistent terminology and product names, refrain from industry jargon, and write with a consistent tone.
- Topical depth: Shallow content won’t do. Topical depth indicates authority, expertise, and trustworthiness—important signals in a landscape increasingly flooded with low-quality content. Create resources that help your customers, answer their questions, and provide new information on a topic.
3. Build Content Moats That AI Can’t Replicate
The same informational articles that used to drive traffic are quickly losing relevance. Nobody needs (or wants) to read your 4,000-word blog post about setting up a local WordPress environment when Gemini or ChatGPT can deliver a clearer, more personalized response in seconds.
To stay relevant, content needs to go beyond what AI can generate.
This means creating content, resources, and tools that can’t be replicated in LLM-generated responses. A prime example of this is Figma’s community-powered template directory that drives thousands of organic visits to their site every day.
Screen capture of Figma’s Community Social Media Templates page by the author.
Figma users generate new design files, and each one automatically gets its own landing page. As more assets are created, these pages start ranking organically without any involvement from editorial teams.
The genius behind this tactic? Because it’s community-driven, it’s easy to scale! Landing pages can be created programmatically based on a template, and the underlying value is safeguarded from AI replication.
What’s the key to building a content moat that improves visibility, engagement, and lead capture? Provide resources that empower your customers to solve problems faster and with less friction.
4. Own Your Channels
In a world where social media platforms can ban you for holding incorrect opinions and algorithm updates can decimate your website traffic overnight, it’s more important than ever to take back control by building channels that you control.
Building an email list gives you a direct, dependable way to reach your audience, without relying on third-party algorithms. Creating your own community platform fosters deeper engagement, giving people a space to connect, ask questions, and access resources on your terms.
Owning your communication channels and user spaces gives you resilience (and control) in an increasingly fragmented digital landscape.
Do this by leveraging tools that give you direct control over your site and data. For example, GravityKit extends Gravity Forms, turning form entries into powerful front-end applications like directories, resource libraries, and dashboards, all hosted on your own WordPress site.
5. Develop Trust and Authority in Your Niche
EEAT (which stands for Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness) is the framework Google uses to evaluate content. It also happens to be important for visibility in LLM answers.
Think about it: If you came across an article with no author name, no “last updated” date, and published by a brand that you’ve never heard of, would you trust it? Probably not.
But if you saw an article written by an expert in the field from a brand that you’re familiar with, you’d be more likely to take it seriously. That’s how LLMs think, too.
Developing trust and authority in your niche is a way to demonstrate EEAT, ensuring your content is not only well-received by people but prioritized by answer engines. This involves optimizing on-site signals (author pages, external links, content clarity) as well as off-site signals, such as backlinks and brand mentions.
Brand mentions are an important predictor of inclusion in AI citations. Branded web mentions signal to LLMs that your brand is authoritative, trustworthy, and worth paying attention to.
You can boost brand mentions by publishing original content that’s citation-worthy (think original research, helpful resources, free tools) and engaging in digital PR to improve visibility and brand recognition.
6. Dare To Be Different. Stand Out From the Crowd.
For years, the go-to SEO advice was to mimic the top-ranking pages: same structure, same keywords, same talking points. The result? A sea of near-identical content offering little originality or value.
Today, differentiation is what wins. To stand out, you need to develop a distinct brand voice and share a unique point of view. How? Create content that others aren’t making, whether that’s through first-hand experience, original data, strong editorial perspectives, or simply a new way of framing old problems.
It’s not just your content that needs to stand out. Your value proposition does too. Why should customers choose you and not a competitor? What makes your offering unique? What experiences can you provide that other brands can’t? These are the questions that marketers need to ask themselves.
In the AI era, the biggest risk to your brand isn’t having your content commodified by LLMs. It’s becoming invisible!
7. Treat the Web as One Large Search Engine
Marketers love to talk about the “funnel”, but here’s the truth: there’s no such thing.
McKinsey killed the funnel way back in 2009, and most marketers still haven’t caught on.
McKinsey’s research showed that customers don’t move through neat, linear stages on the path to purchase. Instead, they engage with countless brands across a maze of touchpoints. They jump between platforms, reform opinions, and constantly change their minds until eventually, a purchase decision is made. And even then, the journey isn’t over.
With AI-powered search platforms and increasing interconnectivity, purchase journeys are only going to become more complex, not less.
Marketers must adapt by treating the web as one large search engine and prioritizing visibility on platforms where their target customers hang out.
Screen capture of SparkToro’s Audience Affinity chart by the author.
A consistent brand presence across high-priority platforms increases your chances of being top of mind when a purchase decision is made. What’s even more effective? Answering user questions, providing educational content, and standing out with unique branding that resonates.
Use tools like SparkToro to see where your target audience spends time. Interview customers to understand their pain points. Send out surveys asking how customers found your website. Then, use this information to prioritize visibility across the platforms that matter and tailor your messaging accordingly.
A Final Word of Advice for Standing Out in an AI World
Success rarely comes from a single bold move. It’s the result of small, incremental improvements made over time. In a digital landscape that’s constantly shifting, staying agile and adaptable is key.
As the web becomes more interconnected and user journeys more complex, marketers need to think holistically. That means aligning content, brand, product, and performance with broader organizational goals. It’s not just about getting attention. It’s about building cohesion across every touchpoint and standing out with differentiated messaging.
Leave us a comment to let us know what you’re doing to stand out in an AI world.
This article’s featured image comes from Carlo Obrien on Pexels.
