By Ayaan Mohamud, RVP Marketing APJ at impact.com
Think about the last time you typed something into Google and actually clicked on a result. For me, and many other people, that habit is looking more and more like something I used to do (like my MySpace page). Instead, we’re typing questions into ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude and walking away with an answer that already includes a shortlist of brands, products, and recommendations. The search engine was the front door to commerce for two decades. AI is moving it.
A channel that barely registered eighteen months ago is now moving serious commercial volume, and it got there fast. Adobe’s data
puts the scale into perspective. Traffic to US retail sites from generative AI sources surged 4,700 per cent year-on-year as of mid-2025, yet many brands are not yet building for it.
The implications run deeper than a new source of website traffic.
What AI has fundamentally altered is the moment when a consumer decides which brands are even worth considering. Before they visit your site, before they check your reviews, before they compare prices, an AI model has already decided whether you belong in the conversation. Think about that for a second. If you are not in that consideration set, everything else you are spending on marketing that product is wasted.
The funnel has not just changed shape. It has changed owners. I think most of us can agree that the traditional marketing funnel is pretty much dead. What has replaced it is messier and faster. Discovery, research, trust, and purchase collide in rapid bursts rather than moving in orderly sequence. AI has accelerated that considerably and handed meaningful power to a new gatekeeper in the process.
The old model rewarded brands famous enough to appear in broad search results and wealthy enough to outbid competitors for paid placements. AI does not work that way. Boston Consulting Group
found that consumers arriving via AI-assisted discovery are 10 per cent more engaged than those coming through traditional channels, reaching brands further along the purchase journey with stronger intent to buy. They have already done the filtering. The consideration set has already been curated before they even land on your site.
Getting into that consideration set is a very different challenge from ranking on a search results page.
Trust is the algorithm
So what determines which brands make the cut? Increasingly, it comes down to the same thing consumers have always responded to. Trusted, authentic, third-party voices. Evertune’s analysis of
the top sources cited by AI models found that more than 40 per cent of referenced content either contains affiliate links or is sponsored content from commerce publishers and creators. Large language models weigh content that carries genuine credibility signals. In-depth reviews, expert comparisons, editorial recommendations from trusted publishers, and authentic creator perspectives.
Consequently, partnerships sit at the centre of AI-era marketing. Affiliate publishers, commerce creators, and content partners have always driven clicks and conversions. Now they are shaping the citation patterns that determine which brands get surfaced when a consumer asks an AI for an answer or a recommendation. A brand with a rich ecosystem of trusted partners and authentic content distributed across credible domains is a brand that AI is more likely to put on the list.
The generational gap tells you everything about where this is heading. Skai research that 67 per cent of Gen Z are already comfortable with AI auto-buying, compared to 19 per cent of Boomers. Brands that are not visible in the AI discovery layer will now have a much harder problem to solve when the majority flips.
Challenger brands, take note
It may sound daunting, but there is an underappreciated opportunity in this shift. The old SEO environment rewarded size, or at least deep pockets. Established brands with large domain authority and significant ad budgets had a structural advantage that was genuinely difficult to overcome. But AI does not hand that advantage to incumbents in the same way.
If your product is relevant, your content is credible, and you have built genuine relationships with trusted publishers and creators in your category, or even your own customers, you can show up in AI recommendations that would have been out of reach through traditional search. That window will not stay open indefinitely. Right now though, it is about as level a playing field as performance marketing has offered in a long time.
Visibility has moved upstream
The challenge for most marketing teams is that AI’s visibility remains opaque in a way that traditional search never was. You could look up your Google ranking on a Monday morning and know exactly where you stood. Understanding how an AI model responds to a relevant query in your category and which content partners most influence that response has, until recently, been nearly impossible.
That is changing.
Generative Engine Optimisation is giving marketers the tools to start answering that question. And what those tools keep revealing is that the brands showing up in AI recommendations are not the ones that outspent the market. They are the ones who built genuine, distributed content ecosystems. Real reviews, credible editorial voices, and authentic creator perspectives. The kind of content that partnership marketing has always been good at producing.
So the strategic answer turns out to be less complicated than it sounds. Back the creators, publishers, and affiliates whose content your category’s AI recommendations are already drawing from. Treat those relationships as visibility infrastructure, not just a conversion channel, and you’ll be building something that compounds over time.
The brands that figure this out first will not just rank better in AI recommendations. They will be the ones that consumers actually find when they go looking. Everything else is marketing that happens after the decision has already been made.
The front door to commerce has moved. The question is whether your brand is visible from the street.