CMOs: Google Just Confirmed Your Brand Visibility Strategy Needs to Change
- Sophie Carr
- May 17
- 4 min read
Search is being rebuilt around AI. If your brand isn't showing up, it's time to rethink how you're found.
By Sophie Carr - Founder and CEO, GAIO Marketing
TLDR
A recently released U.S. Department of Justice court document confirms Google is rebuilding its search engine to centre around large language models (LLMs). This is not a tweak. It’s a ground-up rethink of how search works, from how pages are ranked, to how results are retrieved and displayed.
If your content visibility strategy still relies solely on traditional SEO, you're optimising for an older system that Google is actively replacing. At GAIO Marketing, we've been helping brands adapt to this shift since 2022. And with AI shaping how decisions are made, now is the moment to get ahead.
Table of Contents
What Google Just Confirmed About the Future of Brand Visibility
In May 2025, a document surfaced during the U.S. DOJ's antitrust case against Google, featuring an internal interview with Pandu Nayak, Google’s Vice President of Search. He stated:
“Google is currently re-thinking their search stack from the ground-up with LLM taking a more prominent role. They are thinking about how fundamental components of search (ranking, retrieval, displaying SERP) can be reimagined given the availability of LLMs.” - DOJ Trial Exhibit PXR0357
That means traditional ranking methods, like keywords, backlinks, and metadata, are no longer the only signals. Google is now designing for a world where AI delivers the answer, not a list of results.
Why CMOs Are Paying Attention to AI-Driven Discovery
If you're a CMO, this directly affects how your audience finds and trusts your brand.
Buyers are no longer just typing in search terms. They're asking questions to tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot, and those tools are deciding which brands to cite.
In these AI-native environments, visibility depends on whether you're recognised as the best answer. If you're not showing up there, you're missing out at the exact moment decisions are being shaped.
The signals That Led Here
This isn’t happening in a vacuum. The shift has been building for a while.
In February 2024, Gartner predicted that traditional search engine volume will drop 25 percent by 2026 due to the rise of AI tools.
In March 2025, Adobe Analytics reported a 1200 percent increase in traffic from generative AI tools to US retail websites in just one year.
Google already uses AI models like RankBrain, DeepRank, and RankEmbed BERT, all trained on user click and query data. These are not side experiments — they are live components shaping what shows up in search.
The writing has been on the wall. Now it’s in court documents.
How to Evolve Your Visibility Strategy for AI Search
Traditional SEO gets your content listed as a blue link. Generative AI Optimisation (GAIO) helps your brand get cited as a part of an answer to a question your audience is asking AI right now. To win you need to create meaningful content that humans and AI learn from, save for later and share with others.
To be found in this new system, your content needs to:
Answer high-intent, natural-language questions
Use structure and formatting that AI can interpret
Include authorship and sources that build trust
Be connected to your brand’s topical authority
Be designed for summarisation, not just for search
This is not about adding more content. It's about creating the kind of content that AI sees as useful, reliable and clear.
What GAIO Marketing Has Proven About Strategic Visibility
At GAIO, we've been solving this problem since 2022. We help CMOs and marketing teams:
Identify the real questions their audience are asking AI
Audit their current visibility in AI-generated responses and create brand intelligence reports
Create a strategic content plan to increase trust, clarity and relevance
Track brand visibility in AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity
Refine their strategy and apply new learnings we know are working in other industries
One global enterprise saw measurable improvements in AI visibility within 30 days. The results were clear. And repeatable.
Where to Begin: Building Your AI Visibility Strategy Now
If you're still relying only on SEO dashboards, you're not seeing the full picture. Start here:
Write down five questions your ideal buyer might ask an AI tool during their decision process
Check whether your brand is showing up in those answers
Take one key page and rewrite it with that question as the heading
Structure the answer so it's clear, concise and backed by sources
Monitor changes in AI visibility, not just your position in Google SERPs
Need help? That’s what GAIO Marketing was built for.
FAQs: Your Most Pressing Questions on SEO, GAIO and AI Search
Is SEO dead?
No. But it’s no longer the whole story. SEO gets you listed. GAIO helps you get quoted.
Do we need a big tech stack change?
No. This is primarily about strategy and structure. The right changes can be implemented quickly with your existing team.
Is this only for tech companies?
Not at all. We work with financial services, retail, B2B SaaS and others. If your customers are using AI to evaluate options, it applies to you.
How fast can we expect results?
Our clients have seen measurable visibility gains in 30 days when the right changes are made. It depends on your current footprint.
Is this a one-off project?
No. It’s an ongoing capability. But you can get started with one smart pilot and build from there.
Search is changing. Google has confirmed it.
Buyers have already moved. Now your brand needs to show up where decisions begin.