- AI is changing visibility: Brands must appear in AI-generated answers, not just rank in search results.
- Consistency drives inclusion: AI favours brands with clear, consistent information across multiple credible sources.
- Authority matters: Strong media coverage, thought leadership and trusted third-party mentions increase AI visibility.
- Outdated information is a risk: Fragmented or conflicting content can lead to inaccurate AI summaries and reputational damage.
- Build a connected content ecosystem: Align websites, reports, media coverage and messaging to create a clear, verifiable public record.
For years, brand visibility meant dominating search engine rankings. That model is shifting. Many people now receive direct answers from AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity or through AI-generated summaries embedded in search results.
This new reality changes what ‘visibility’ means in practice. It is no longer only about ranking – it is about whether your brand is part of the answer at all.
Google’s AI Overviews, which it has rolled out across search, make this shift visible. Instead of showing only links, Google generates a summary at the top of the page in response to some queries.
A Pew Research Center study published in July 2025 analysed the browsing activity of 900 adults and found that users clicked on traditional search results in only 8% of searches where an AI summary appeared, compared to 15% where there was no summary.
What matters for brands
Clicks on links inside the AI summaries were even lower, accounting for only 1% of visits. The findings suggest that when users receive a complete answer upfront, many do not continue beyond the summary.
That matters for brands. Fewer clicks mean fewer chances to shape how you are understood through content housed on your own platforms.
For South African corporates, this shift builds on an already competitive digital environment. Traditional search engine optimisation, media coverage and social media posting remain important marketing tools, but they no longer guarantee your visibility inside AI-generated responses.
GEO and how AI systems decide what shows up
Understanding how AI systems generate answers to search queries is the starting point. This is where Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) becomes relevant. It looks at how brands appear in AI-generated answers, not only where they rank in search results.
According to OpenAI, large language models are trained on large volumes of publicly available text. When answering a question, many AI tools pull real-time information from the internet to improve accuracy. In both cases, the output reflects what is already most present and consistent in the public record.
Brands that appear frequently and across credible sources are more likely to be referenced in AI search results. Brands with fragmented or contradictory records are more likely to be misrepresented or ignored. This puts pressure on brands to pay closer attention to something most organisations underestimate: consistency.
If a brand is described differently across press releases, outdated bios, scattered reports and inconsistent media coverage, AI systems are more likely to produce incomplete or uneven summaries. This is not because the model is biased, but because the source material is fragmented.
When fragmented information becomes a reputational risk
There is a reputational layer that is often overlooked. Generative AI systems summarise information that is publicly available online. They reflect what exists in the public record, without prioritising what a company intends to communicate. If outdated or negative information is more visible than official content, it can shape how an organisation is represented in AI-generated responses.
This is a real challenge for many South African organisations. Information is often spread across reports, PDFs, archived webpages and media coverage that are not always aligned. That fragmentation can affect how AI tools describe a brand.
What matters increasingly is coherence: consistent naming, updated leadership information, clear governance and impact reporting and media coverage that is easy to verify and trace. These established communication principles now influence whether a brand is accurately reflected in AI-generated answers.
Technical and editorial work
Flow Communications is seeing growing demand from organisations to build connected information ecosystems rather than isolated campaigns. This means aligning media relations and owned content so that the public record is consistent and stable.
In practice, this includes both technical and editorial work. Technical work involves cleaning outdated information, aligning naming conventions and improving how reports are structured online. Editorial work focuses on clear, consistent messaging so that key information about a business is current and accessible across platforms.
As AI becomes a default gateway to information, communications is no longer only about creating content or running campaigns. It is also about maintaining a clear and credible public record. The organisations that do this well are more likely to be accurately represented in the answers people increasingly rely on.
Thelma Ngoma-Mavhunga is a senior communications specialist at Flow Communications.
