Marketing is moving away from online promotion to AI-driven discovery.
AI visibility has suddenly become a $1.8 billion marketing category.
Profound has raised $180 million at a $1.8 billion valuation to help companies understand and influence how their brands appear in AI-generated answers.
Beyond SEO, how AEO and GEO are Driving Search
That’s a strong signal that AEO/GEO—optimizing visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI platforms—is moving from experiment to an established marketing discipline. Just to clarify, AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization, and GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization.
Both are digital marketing strategies that evolved alongside traditional SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to help content surface within AI-driven search tools and answer features, and are now essential considerations in website development and content.
Visual search is now emerging
At the same time, Pinterest has introduced Visual Search Ads, allowing brands to appear when consumers identify objects within images rather than type a conventional search.
Why is this important?
Because discovery is fragmenting
Google search + AI answers + visual search + social recommendations are increasingly working together to shape what people know, consider, and ultimately choose. For companies—and especially architecture, development, real estate, hospitality, and place brands—this creates a new branding question:
What does AI think your brand is?
A good example is RIOS, the architecture, landscape, and design firm
RIOS is redesigning its website with generative engine optimization in mind—especially relevant because RIOS also needs to communicate the value of complex places and projects both visually and in words. This needs to be tied to how people think of their projects and how you feature work to match AI search to find your work. This is why RIOS is focusing on:
- Project descriptions with facts and results: Explaining what a project accomplished, not just presenting nice images
- Clearer website organization: Making projects and expertise easier to find
- Detailed case studies and structured data: Giving search systems useful context about the firm and its work
- Sources and supporting evidence: Citing internal and external information that supports project stories
If someone asks an AI platform about your company, property, neighborhood, or development, how does it describe you? What are you known for? Who are you compared with? And, most importantly, does that match the position you want to own?
Brand Strategy Driven by AI Strategy
At RadiantBrands, we see this as an extension of brand strategy, not simply another SEO tactic. Brand positioning increasingly needs to be clear enough to be understood not only by people, but by the AI systems helping those people make decisions.
Understanding and evaluating a website’s structure, visuals, and market- and competition-related content is now essential, and we build this process into our work.
How people adopt AI tools is changing everyting
Online behavior now means understanding AI tools that people use to get valid comparisons and results. You can’t just drive traffic to your site by visits alone or promote your way to the top listing. AI drives authentic comparisons between content or capabilities that are perceived as similar. That’s why an AI Brand Visibility Audit is becoming a logical part of contemporary brand strategy.
The next branding challenge may not simply be getting people to recognize your brand. It may be making sure AI recognizes it correctly.