Brands face a new visibility battle as AI plays favourites

A brand can rank on Google, have a slick website and still disappear when a consumer asks AI what to buy.

That may sound contradictory, but Duncan Egan, vice president of enterprise marketing, Asia Pacific and Japan at Adobe, says it is already happening. Speaking on the back of the Adobe Summit in Singapore at the end of July, Egan shared that brands today face a visibility issue.

Sharing a study internally of a luxury handbag brand, he said the brand appeared when consumers asked AI about how to care for luxury handbags, but became far less visible when the questions shifted to shopping for luxury handbags or finding the best ones.

For Egan, that example captures the new visibility problem marketers need to get their heads around – it is not enough for AI to know your brand. It needs to know your brand at the right point in the customer journey.

Additionally, data from a June 2026 report by Adobe cited that AI traffic to US retail sites increased 1,324% between October 2024 and May 2026, while AI traffic to travel sites rose 2,215% over the same period.

For Egan, this makes AI visibility a new frontier for marketers, but not one that replaces the old one.

“I think there’s a lot that goes into the brand visibility bucket. Part of it is around what is the journey, but a crucial question to ask is how am I showing up to my customer and is it in the right way,” he explained to MARKETING-INTERACTIVE.

The shift is happening as AI moves from being a tool for finding information to becoming part of how consumers research, compare and make decisions.

Egan explains that to remain competitive, marketing leaders across both B2B and B2C must learn to adapt their AI search strategy and analytics frameworks to account for AI-mediated discovery. This involves optimising content for AI comprehension, building citation authority through credible sources and user-generated signals, and implementing structured data that helps AI systems accurately interpret brand information.

Equally important is adopting new measurement models that track AI mentions, citation quality, and assisted influence throughout the emerging AI customer journey.

The new battlefield

Egan also compared the rise of AI visibility to the early days of Google.

“This is the new frontier much like when Google Search came out. You were missing the boat until you thought about SEO and paid search. Now with brand visibility, it's really around how are you showing up to agents? What is your content strategy?” he said.

The handbag example also shows why that distinction matters. A brand could have strong visibility when someone is looking for information yet vanish when that same consumer moves further down the funnel and asks AI what they should actually buy.

In other words, being mentioned is not the same as being recommended, and that is where marketers need to start thinking differently.

“Whoever uses the most AI is not going to win this,” he said. Instead, marketers need to understand where AI fits into the customer journey and how their brands appear within it,” Egan said.

Traditional search is not disappearing either. Rather, AI is adding another layer to discovery, one where a consumer can ask a question, receive a recommendation, ask a follow-up and narrow down their options without ever browsing a conventional search results page.

The content explosion is not slowing down

And while marketers might rush to create more content to flood their own media or spend more on paid, the answer to the new battleground is not to simply start churning out even more content. Egan argues that if anything, marketers already have too much of it.

“We can't keep up with this content explosion. We have to apply our products and our AI to allow us to scale,” he said.

Egan shared that across B2B and B2C, teams across multi-markets often end up commissioning similar assets without knowing the work already existed elsewhere, or duplicating work for their teams.

This is where AI can help untangle that mess by adapting existing content for different markets, formats and audiences.

For creative teams, that could mean spending less time on the mechanical work and more time on the work that actually requires a human brain.

“It's going to allow teams to do what they're really good at, which is create brand-defining creative, and not spending 90% of their time resizing assets or recolouring assets,” Egan said. And that distinction matters because AI visibility really comes down to making sure the right information about a brand is available in the first place.

Humans still decide what the brand means

If AI is taking on more of the repetitive work, Egan believes the marketer’s role will become more strategic, not less.

“It's so important now for marketers to know the business, not just their business,” he said.

That means understanding the wider sales and marketing strategies, the markets the business operates in, and the reasons behind its decisions.

AI can help marketers surface information, spot patterns and work faster. But Egan does not see that as a substitute for judgement.

“We humans bring the strategy. Humans bring the context,” he said. And that may be the most important distinction in the AI era.

For Egan, that is why the rise of AI does not mean the marketer will disappear.

“It’s not replacing a marketer, it’s defining marketing,” he said.

As consumers increasingly ask AI what to buy, where to go and which brands to consider, the battle for visibility is moving beyond the search results page.

The marketer's job is no longer simply to produce content or optimise for search rankings. It is to decide what the brand stands for, what it needs to say and where it needs to be seen, while AI increasingly helps determine what consumers see along the way.

For marketers, the priority is to use AI, not just watch it evolve. That means experimenting with the tools already at hand, learning from peers and communities, and staying open to how roles and workflows will change, and those who engage early will be best placed to turn AI into meaningful business and customer value.

“It’s about going into this with a growth mindset. In time, we will look back at this as redefining how we do our jobs, and what the technology can do to help us do that,” he added.

This article was written in collaboration with Adobe.