Most marketing teams are still having the same conversation they were having three years ago: rankings, backlinks, click-through rates. All of it still matters, but there's a fairly significant shift happening that a lot of businesses are either ignoring or haven't quite caught up with yet. AI-powered search is changing where and how people find information online, and the companies that get ahead of it now are going to be in a considerably stronger position than those scrambling to adapt in 18 months' time. 

The short version is this: tools like ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, and Perplexity are increasingly becoming the first stop for people asking questions online. They don't return a list of ten blue links; they generate an answer, sometimes citing sources, sometimes not. If your brand doesn't appear in these answers, you're becoming invisible to a growing segment of your audience, no matter how well your traditional SEO is doing. 

Search Behaviour Is Changing 

People are changing how they search for things; instead of typing "Manchester accountants" into Google and scrolling through the results, someone might ask an AI assistant "what's the best type of accountant for a small e-commerce business in the UK?". The response they get back is synthesised, conversational, and doesn't often require them to click anywhere at all. That's a genuinely different kind of search experience, and it requires a genuinely different approach to being found. 

Large language models pull information from across the web, but they don't treat all sources equally. They tend to favour content that's authoritative, clear, well-structured, and genuinely useful rather than content optimised with a particular keyword density in mind. This means some of the old tricks don't work particularly well in this new environment; a page stuffed with variations of the same phrase isn't going to get cited in an AI-generated response the way a genuinely well-written explainer might. 

There's also the question of entity recognition. LLMs build associations between brands, topics, and authority signals. If your business is consistently mentioned alongside relevant topics across credible sources, that helps establish you as a recognisable entity in the model's understanding of your sector. It's not entirely unlike traditional PR in some respects, though the mechanisms are quite different. 

Why This Is Worth Taking Seriously Now, Not Later 

The businesses that benefited most from early SEO adoption didn't wait until Google was dominant to start paying attention. They were building domain authority and earning links while everyone else was still relying on directory submissions and keyword stuffing. The window to get a meaningful head start on LLM visibility is still open, but it won't stay open indefinitely. 

For anyone trying to get a clearer handle on what this actually means in practice, there's a solid breakdown of why LLM visibility should be part of your digital strategy in 2026 that's worth reading if you're thinking about where to direct your attention over the next year or so. It gets into the practical side of things without being overly technical. 

One thing that's easy to overlook is that LLM visibility and traditional SEO aren't really competing priorities. The content practices that help you get cited by AI models, being authoritative, specific, genuinely useful, clearly structured, are largely the same practices that make content perform well in organic search. Investing in one tends to support the other. The main addition is thinking more intentionally about how your brand is represented across the wider web, not just on your own site. 

Where Businesses Actually Go Wrong 

The most common mistake is treating this as a future problem. "We'll look at it when it's more established" is something a lot of marketing directors are saying right now, and it's understandable, there are always more immediate fires to deal with. But AI search adoption is moving quickly, particularly among younger professional audiences who've already shifted a significant portion of their research behaviour towards these tools. 

Another issue is assuming that existing content is good enough. If your site is full of thin pages written primarily to rank for a specific term rather than to actually answer a question well, those pages aren't going to cut through in an LLM environment. A content audit with this lens in mind is genuinely useful, even if the results are a bit uncomfortable to look at. 

The brands that are paying attention to this now aren't the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones with teams willing to update their thinking about what good digital marketing actually looks like in 2025 and beyond.