By Dom Coleridge, Commercial Director, Scale Digital
AI has been the dominant talking point across the marketing and tech industries in 2025, with its influence only set to grow. For brand marketers, one major consequence of this trend is its impact on ‘traditional’ search channels.
In the second half of 2024, Google began rolling out AI Overviews internationally. This enhanced form of search result aims to answer a user’s question directly within Google’s own ecosystem and typically features a box at the top of screen where Google summarises key information from the leading search results, drawn from the sites of external publishers.
One side-effect of Google’s move is that, when the search engine successfully provides the information the user is looking for, the user no longer has any need to click a link or visit the website where the information was originally published.
The impact on publishers and brands
As a direct result of this shift, publishers are experiencing a substantial drop in engagement from search, with media reports that some media titles have seen anything up to a 50% drop in traffic. This, in turn, is likely to impact the ad revenues of online publishers, as monthly users continue to decline.
More generally, brands that previously relied on Google for visibility now face a fragmented discovery landscape. With Google’s search functionality now shifting focus from ‘reach’ to ‘engagement’, it is increasingly favouring richer formats such as YouTube and Reddit, while audiences are spread across influencer content, connected TV, and mobile-first platforms.
As we approach the close of 2025, AI-driven search and recommendation systems now underpin the majority of discovery journeys online. Most customers are likely to use and trust an AI tool to find more information about a brand. AI is also now moving into the ecommerce space, with OpenAI introducing a feature that allows users to make purchases through ChatGPT, in partnership with Etsy and Shopify.
This shift has broad implications for brand strategies: the traditional online partnerships that you have relied on to date no longer guarantee predictable reach. So, what can you do?
Adapting to AI-driven discovery
To adapt to AI-driven discovery, brands and affiliates must create content designed for both human audiences and machine interpretation.
AI models prioritise content based on context, authority, freshness, and intent rather than pure keyword matching – use the FLIP framework, which stands for Freshness, Local Intent, In-Depth Context, and Personalisation, as a way to understand and optimise for these signals.
AI Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the next evolution beyond your traditional search marketing activity. GEO focuses on ensuring content is surfaced and cited accurately in AI-generated summaries and recommendations. Key points to consider include:
- Structured Data and Metadata: Ensure all affiliate and brand pages are machine-readable for AI indexing.
- Content Clustering and Authority: Build small interlinked clusters of 3-5 pages to enhance contextual visibility. Also, co-author with experts, showcase original data, and follow platform policies (E-E-A-T uplift).
- Distribution and Repurposing: Repurpose top-performing content into social shorts, YouTube clips, podcasts.
- Testing and Freshness: Refresh more than 10% of all content monthly and revisit dormant pages quarterly to maintain performance under GEO principles.
Building an AI-ready partner ecosystem
No brand operates in isolation. If you are hoping to fully leverage the benefits of AI, it will be necessary to assess your partner organisations and evaluate how your agencies, affiliates, and creators are adapting to AI discovery and GEO. In some cases, this will mean brands diversifying their partner mix to include creators, video publishers, and retail media platforms with strong AI visibility.
Practical steps brands can take include testing multiple channels, particularly those that might be new to your brand, e.g. YouTube, podcast feeds, retail search, and connected TV. You might also consider securing guaranteed distribution via media such as newsletter placements, homepage features, or in-app discovery slots.
At the same time, agencies, brands, and partners will need to invest in tools and platforms that optimise AI search rankings and provide real-time performance insights. These technologies will become central to everyday workflows, helping teams stay ahead of evolving algorithms and deliver content that resonates. Embedding AI-driven infrastructures to analyse client sentiment, manage relationships, and track engagement will become as fundamental as today’s leading CRM systems, while partnerships with AI indexing specialists will further enhance strategy and execution.
Performance-driven partnership models
Performance-based marketing offers the adaptability required in an AI-shaped environment.
Affiliates and brands can collaborate on predictive performance analytics to identify emerging discovery trends and leverage dynamic content optimisation informed by AI-generated insights. Contemporary tech platforms provide shared dashboards for transparent cross-channel attribution and revenue tracking, and thanks to recent advancements this can now be done on newer channels like CTV and voice commerce.In summary, AI should not be viewed as a threat to brand marketers but, rather, a catalyst for better, more intelligent brand discovery. Resilient brands, media partners, and affiliates should optimise for GEO and AI discovery signals, diversify away from traditional SEO dependency and build performance-driven partnerships grounded in data, agility, and creativity. By working strategically with media partners and leveraging performance-first channels such as affiliate marketing, brands can maintain engagement, drive measurable outcomes, and strengthen their partner ecosystem.
