By Joshua Lohr, Senior SEO Manager at Contentful
For decades, marketing strategies have revolved around understanding human audiences. We have built personas for Gen Z, Millennials, Boomers, B2B buyers, and every imaginable niche in between. But in 2025, it is time to add a brand-new persona to your marketing mix: Artificial Intelligence.
Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others have established themselves as the new front door to the digital world. They have been joined this summer in the UK by Google’s AI Mode which, given its reach, has the potential to deliver a major shift in how people find and interact with content. It rewrites the SEO rulebook, again.
The new AI tools are changing how consumers discover, research, and engage with brands. If your marketing strategy still only targets human eyes, you are already behind.
From search to summaries
Traditionally, brand visibility relied on search engine optimisation (SEO). Marketers played by the rules of keywords, backlinks, and metadata to rank high on search results pages. And while SEO remains crucial, a parallel discipline is emerging: Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO).
Unlike SEO, which is about generating clicks, GEO is about improving the visibility of your brand’s content in AI results, all while ensuring your brand is accurately and positively represented. As users increasingly ask AI for answers, it is the summaries that are often their first and only impression.
Recent research by Authoritas, an SEO and AI platform, found that when Google’s AI search options appear in UK results, click-through rates drop by 47.5% on desktop and 37.7% on mobile. AI is not just pointing to your content, in many cases, it is becoming your content. Which begs a critical question: who or what is summarising your brand? And what are they saying?
The algorithm is your new gatekeeper
Today’s AI models are trained on vast datasets that include blog posts, help documentation, reviews, press articles, FAQs and Reddit threads. When someone asks a question, generative engines draw from this mountain of data to create a tidy, conversational response.
AI does not always link to your content. It interprets it. This means your brand is no longer just being read by people, it is being understood, repackaged, and summarised by machines. And unlike traditional audiences, AI has no emotions, loyalty, or gut feelings. It reflects what it is fed. If your messaging is inconsistent, outdated, or vague, it could be misrepresented.
In this new landscape, the AI model is your audience, and potentially, your biggest influencer.
Writing for AI means writing clearly
Just like marketers adapt messaging for different platforms and audiences they now need to optimise content for AI comprehension. The irony is that it does not mean writing for robots, it actually means the opposite: writing clearly, consistently, and authentically, so both people and machines understand your brand story.
So, what does this look like in practice?
Perhaps the most important demand AI makes on your brand is consistency. A uniform structure across platforms is ideal for a technology that thrives on predictability. If your boilerplate or product descriptions differ between your site, social bios, and customer service docs, it creates confusion and not just for people, but for models trying to summarise your offering too.
Another demand that AI makes of brands is to use human language. Gone are the days of run-on sentences stuffed with keywords (not that brands should have been doing that for SEO in 2025 anyway.) Natural, human language is in, especially when it is written in a conversational style. AI models are optimised to understand intent, not gimmicks, puns and similes. Ultimately, the more your content reflects the way real people speak and search, the more likely it is to be surfaced accurately.
Thirdly brands need to consider tone and emotional resonance. AI cannot feel emotion, but it can reflect tone and if your content expresses clear values, purpose, and personality, those cues will likely be picked up and echoed in summaries.
Publish where AI pays attention
Not all content sources are weighted equally in AI training. Community-driven platforms like Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, and FAQs often play a heavier role in informing AI than your average web page.
However, trusted media brands remain the gold standard. If your product is reviewed or mentioned in credible editorial environments, major newspapers, tech publications, expert roundups, it stands a better chance of showing up in AI-generated summaries.
It may feel strange to treat a machine as a primary audience, but in a world where AI mediates how and whether people discover your brand, it is not just strategic, it is essential. ChatGPT and Perpexity had already begun the shift to AI-powered search, now Google’s AI Mode will make the concept mainstream.
Marketers are already adept at reshaping messages for different channels: TikTok users, B2B buyers, Boomers, or Gen Z. Now, there is a new audience to address. It may not fit neatly into your persona models, yet it has enormous power to shape human decisions.
