In the age of AI, your brand is no longer just what you say to your audiences.
It’s also what AI generates on your behalf. What LLMs infer from scattered signals. What consumers hear when they ask ChatGPT or Gemini, “What’s the best enterprise marketing platform?”
In this session, technical SEO and branding strategist Myriam Jessier delivers a wake-up call to enterprise marketers: If you’re not actively managing your algorithmic footprint, AI systems will define your brand for you. And it may not be accurate. Or favorable.
This isn’t a prediction about what’s coming, but what is happening now.
Watch the interview
If your current brand management playbook doesn’t include how AI interprets your digital presence, it’s already outdated. Myriam’s session will help you close the gap.
The AI-narrated brand is a new frontier
Search is no longer just blue links. Traditional search engines and LLMs are converging to instead generate answers, summaries, and insights These systems synthesize sources like:
- Articles and blog posts
- Third-party content
- Public documentation
- UGC, social trends, and more
And AI doesn’t care what your latest campaign says. It’s building its understanding from your digital residue.
Most enterprises are flying blind with AI search
Here’s the problem: most brands lack real-time visibility into how they’re represented across:
- AI search platforms (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity)
- Multimodal search (image + voice + text)
- Aggregated SERP features (previews, overviews, zero-click)
They’re using fragmented tools, stale dashboards, and reactive reports.
“Insights are lagging. Tech stacks aren’t talking. By the time you see an issue, it’s already hurting perception.”
Brands are now co-created with AI
You don’t own the narrative alone anymore: AI has turned branding into a co-creation exercise. Your brand is now shaped by:
- Your marketing team
- Your customers
- Online communities
- Public data
- AI model training inputs
And most of this happens outside your control, unless you act intentionally. This is why your strategy must now address:
- How AI interprets your structured data
- What sources AI systems trust and favor when summarizing your business
- Where gaps exist between your message and AI’s version of it
How Can AI Answers Shape Brand Perception Before a Purchase Journey Begins?
AI answers can shape brand perception before the purchase journey begins by making direct, personalized, and contextual brand introductions when users are simply exploring topics or seeking general information.
When someone asks ChatGPT or Google about solutions to their problems, the brands mentioned in those responses gain immediate credibility and consideration. This pre-purchase influence is powerful because it happens during the exploratory phase when users are most open to recommendations.
Here's how AI answers influence brand perception:
- Create category associations. When AI consistently mentions your brand for certain queries, users begin associating you with those solutions—even if they weren't initially searching for specific brands
- Build trust through third-party validation. AI recommendations feel more objective than ads, so being cited by AI systems serves as implicit endorsement that influences how users perceive you.
- Establish expertise positioning. Brands frequently referenced in AI answers get positioned as industry experts, making users more likely to trust them when ready to purchase
- Shape competitive landscape. AI often presents 3-5 options for comparison, and being included or excluded from these lists directly impacts whether users consider you a viable option
- Shape problem-solution connections. AI responses can introduce your brand while users are still understanding their problem, positioning you as the natural solution before they start comparing options
- Set quality expectations. How AI describes your brand—premium, budget-friendly, innovative, reliable—creates anchoring bias that affects how users evaluate you later
For example, when someone asks AI "how to manage remote teams better," and your project management software gets mentioned as helping with specific remote work challenges, you've influenced their perception before they even start shopping for tools.
Semrush's Enterprise AIO platform helps brands monitor how AI systems describe them. Ensuring accurate, consistent, and favorable representation across AI platforms is very important for brands these days.
What’s the Impact of AI Answers on Brand Positioning?
AI answers have a major impact on brand positioning as they can shape how users perceive your brand, define your strengths, and influence whether you are viewed as a leading option in your category.
When AI answers consistently mention your brand in certain ways—as a premium or budget friendly option, innovative or outdated, best for enterprises or small businesses—these characterizations become the de facto positioning in consumers' minds. This AI positioning can either reinforce or completely undermine years of careful brand building.
Here's how AI answers affect brand positioning:
- Lock in market position. Once AI systems categorize your brand in a certain way (e.g., premium, mid-market, budget), users begin to adopt that perception—helping reinforce the positioning you’ve worked to build.
- Define competitive sets automatically. AI answers group brands together when making comparisons, effectively deciding who your competitors are in consumers’ minds and giving you the chance to appear alongside top players in your category.
- Create strong feature associations. The specific benefits or features AI highlights when mentioning your brand become what users expect and remember about you.
- Establish clear use-case alignment. When AI consistently recommends your brand for specific scenarios (“best for startups” or “ideal for enterprises”), it clarifies where you excel and positions you as the go-to solution for relevant audiences.
- Influence price perception. How AI discusses your pricing—expensive, affordable, good value for money—sets expectations that can support your desired positioning and help attract the right customers.
For example, if AI consistently positions your CRM as “simple and affordable for small businesses,” users begin to view your brand as the clear choice for that segment.
This makes monitoring and influencing AI representation crucial. Your brand positioning is no longer just what you communicate—it’s increasingly what AI systems say about you to millions of users every day.
Semrush’s Enterprise AIO platform helps brands track how AI describes them, ensure positioning is accurate and aligned with strategy, and identify opportunities to strengthen their presence across AI platforms.
Why this shift matters for marketing leadership
For enterprise CMOs or leaders, this isn’t just a technical issue. It’s a business risk:
- Misrepresentation in AI overviews = lost authority
- Gaps in visibility = competitive vulnerability
- Inaccurate training data = reputational harm
The brands that win in this new landscape will be those that control their narrative across all search touchpoints. That means:
- Prioritizing search-informed brand tracking
- Investing in machine-readable content assets
- Using real-time insights to steer messaging before it’s misinterpreted by AI
Key takeaways
- AI is already influencing how your brand is described, discovered, and judged—based on your digital footprint.
- Most enterprises lack visibility into how they’re portrayed across LLMs, SERPs, and AI platforms.
- You need unified insights across SEO, content, and brand sentiment to stay in control.
- Branding isn’t just creative but also algorithmic. And it needs to be treated that way.
AI is already reshaping your brand narrative by curating answers, generating summaries, and influencing perceptions based on fragmented digital signals. Without real-time monitoring and optimization capabilities, brands risk being misrepresented or overlooked entirely.
That’s where Semrush Enterprise and AI Optimization (AIO) come in.
AIO empowers marketing leaders to see and shape how their brand appears across AI-driven search ecosystems, from ChatGPT to Perplexity to Gemini:
- Monitor your brand’s visibility and sentiment across AI search platforms and benchmark performance against competitors.
- Understand the sources fuelling how AI interprets your brand, enabling proactive corrections and reputation management.
- Run opportunity analysis for tailored recommendations to help refine and grow your AI search visibility.
In an era where search engines rewrite your narrative in real time, AIO gives you control, visibility, and confidence. It's not enough to be present. Brands must be consistent and recognized as the most authoritative voices in their industries.
