For decades, the central anxiety of brand marketing has been a straightforward one: how to get people to say nice things about you. The new anxiety is somewhat different. Now marketers must also get machines to notice that people are saying nice things about you.

This is the emerging logic of what the trade is calling "AI visibility" — the effort to ensure that when a consumer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity about, say, the best video conferencing software, the large language model responds with something favorable. And since these systems draw their answers from the open web rather than from a brand's own carefully tended properties, marketers are discovering that creators — the influencers, the YouTubers, the TikTok personalities — may be their most valuable proxies.

"The machine is going towards the most accessible public information and the most authentic to get closer to an answer," said Joe Gagliese, chief executive of Viral Nation. "That's not coming from the brand themselves."

Zoom tested this theory over the summer, commissioning the creator-journalist Nayeema Raza to produce content intended to bolster the company's authority in the eyes of both humans and algorithms. Whether it worked is, as yet, uncertain. Measurement, as several agency executives conceded in interviews, has not quite caught up with ambition.

That has not stopped clients from asking. Kristina Coughlin, senior vice president and general manager of Trevant, a performance-based creator marketing agency that is part of the Stagwell empire, said AI visibility comes up "in nearly every pitch we're doing now." Her team has begun auditing which creators and content types generate the most citations in large language models, then optimizing accordingly.

At Crispin, the agency has found that brands previously skeptical of influencer marketing — fearing poor returns — are newly receptive when the pitch is framed around what the industry has taken to calling GEO, or generative engine optimization. (The acronyms proliferate; the budgets follow.)

The irony, of course, is that the same forces pushing brands toward creator partnerships may ultimately dilute their value. If every soap brand floods TikTok with 300,000 creators, the signal becomes noise. "That's not going to get picked up," noted Scott Sutton, chief executive of Later, a social media management platform.

The machines, it seems, have standards.

Original story published in Digiday: "Creators are moving into brands' AI search playbooks"