Creators are moving into brands’ AI search playbooks

Marketers are adding AI visibility to creator briefs, hoping positive creator reviews will help brands appear in AI chatbot search results, according to agency executives speaking with Digiday. Agencies like Trevant and Crispin are auditing creator content for LLM citations and reverse engineering generative engine optimization (GEO) to boost brand presence in AI-powered search. Measurement of the direct link between creator campaigns and AI visibility remains a challenge, but brands are increasingly requesting these strategies.

Join us Sept. 14-16 in Miami to connect with top publishing leaders SECURE YOUR SEAT https://digiday.com/events/digiday-publishing-summit-sep-26/?source=display&utm-source=display There’s a new deliverable on the creator brief: AI visibility. As more people start their shopping journey in AI chatbots, marketers are hoping creators can help put their brand names in front of those shoppers. Brand visibility used to be what a brand said about itself via traditional SEO and paid media. In the age of AI search, LLMs are crawling social media platforms, blogs, news media and sites outside of a brand’s purview to answer search queries. It’s banking on creators’ positive reviews to get do so. “The machine is going towards the most accessible public information and the most authentic to get closer to an answer. That’s not coming from the brand themselves,” said Joe Gagliese, CEO at Viral Nation. Finding brand awareness in AI chatbots Zoom started testing the link https://digiday.com/marketing/zoom-relies-on-creators-to-boost-ai-search-results/ between creators and AI visibility over the summer with a campaign featuring creator-journalist Nayeema Raza. Zoom hired Raza to help the tech company build up its authority and credibility with storytelling. Measurement hasn’t quite caught up yet https://digiday.com/marketing/cmos-are-struggling-to-link-ai-visibility-with-sales/ , and that’s across the AI visibility landscape. According to the four agency execs Digiday spoke with, marketers are still working to find a direct link between creator-led campaigns and AI visibility. But correlation is enough reason for brands to be curious. “We are getting that in nearly every pitch we’re doing now,” said Kristina Coughlin, svp and general manager of Trevant, a performance-based creator marketing agency. Increasingly, clients are asking the influencer agency to track if creator content is showing up in AI-powered search results. They’re also asking for a creator-AI visibility strategy. The AI visibility-creator playbook Agencies like Trevant, have started tweaking their approaches to influencer and creator discovery. For example, Trevant starts by auditing a brand’s current creator content to understand which creators and content types are driving the most citations in LLMs, Coughlin told Digiday. As campaigns go live, the agency continues to track those citations to optimize the campaign and inform future partnerships. Ultimately, the goal is to have AI visibility measurements sit alongside traditional business metrics, like sales, return on ad spend and cost efficiency, Coughlin added. Crispin takes a similar approach in focusing on creators who are already ranking or being cited in LLM results for client campaigns. Crispin’s influencer teams manage these initiatives for now with support from SEO teams to reverse engineer the GEO process, Freddy Dabaghi, Crispin’s chief transformation officer, told Digiday. That reverse engineering has been an in with clients that were hesitant to invest in influencer marketing for fear it wouldn’t return on their investment , but had a strong interest in GEO, Dabaghi said. Creators have already started taking steps https://digiday.com/marketing/creators-build-geo-strategies-to-get-discovered-by-brands-and-agencies-in-ai-search/ toward AI visibility — building out AEO answer engine optimization websites and conducting AEO audits. Meanwhile, agencies are asking creators to ensure social media captions are machine readable with enough information for the LLMs to scrape. “In addition to just sharing information and all the usual things that you would have a caption do, we’re now suddenly like, ‘OK, this is the new long tale of online search, and we need to make sure that this caption is working as hard as possible’,” said Danielle Wiley, CEO of influencer marketing shop Sway Group. Too much of a good thing Brands were already turning to creators https://digiday.com/marketing/brands-turn-niche-news-creators-into-a-new-earned-media-engine/ as part of their earned media strategy. The strategy means to reach people who are tuned into social media feeds for news. Consider the uptick in AI search as jet fuel expediting the push for a creator-AI visibility strategy. Agency execs, however, warn against too much of a good thing. In the hunt for AI visibility, marketers have taken to earning citations via Reddit — though Reddit users are skeptical, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/cmo-today/brands-suddenly-care-about-reddit-redditors-dont-return-the-feeling-e7a9d59c?mod=djemCMOToday “If I have 300,000 TikTokkers making content about my new soap, that’s not going to get picked up via AEO because it’s not in the right spot to get ingested into the AEO engine,” said Scott Sutton, CEO at Later, a social media management and influencer marketing platform. — Digiday senior reporter Alyssa Mercante, contributed to this reporting. More in Marketing Target plans to lower prices after receiving almost $1 billion in tariff refunds https://digiday.com/marketing/target-plans-to-lower-prices-after-receiving-almost-1-billion-in-tariff-refunds/ Tariff refunds were a massive tailwind for Target last quarter that could help it continue to lower prices. OpenAI’s ads business hits Europe at the six month mark https://digiday.com/marketing/openais-ads-business-hits-europe-at-the-six-month-mark/ OpenAI will begin serving ads to people using ChatGPT across 31 European markets beginning August 24. Divine, Vine’s spiritual successor, won’t rule out ads https://digiday.com/marketing/vine-inspired-app-divine-is-launching/ The app has a strict ‘no AI content’ rule, and company isn’t ruling out advertising.