- AI rewards expertise, not ad spend: Challenger brands can compete by becoming the best answer, not the biggest spender.
- Consistency builds authority: Accurate, reliable information is more valuable than broad brand campaigns.
- Specialists are winning: Niche brands with helpful, in-depth content are more likely to be surfaced by AI.
- AEO needs a coordinated strategy: Align SEO, PR, content and paid teams around answering customer questions.
- Keep expertise human: Use AI for optimisation, but rely on original insights and expert knowledge to build trust.
For years, big South African brands could reliably buy their way to visibility. Those who outspent their competitors could dominate the airwaves, flood the funnel, and were everywhere we looked.
But that logic is finally breaking. In an economy where AI systems synthesise responses instead of serving Google and 10 blue links, you can’t pay your way onto page one, because there is no page two. You are either in the answer set, or you essentially don’t exist.
While that may sound terrifying to local incumbents, if you’re a challenger brand, it should sound like the opportunity of the decade.
Why the answer economy just doesn’t care
In an AI-generated answer, models don’t care about your historical media budget or how many awards your brand has won. They care about whether you are a credible, consistent expert on the question the user is asking.
In fact, the brands most at risk today are the ones whose authority has been built almost entirely on media spend and beautiful, high-level storytelling. Their campaigns may be stunning, but they almost always say very little about the real problems they solve or the products they actually sell.
When you add messy data to that picture (think a campaign that says one price while the website and collateral say another), and you have a perfect recipe for being downgraded by answer engines. We’ve seen time and again how inconsistent information doesn’t just confuse customers, it teaches the models you’re unreliable.
Last year’s work is bearing fruit today
By contrast, the kinds of South African brands we already see punching above their weight are specialist retailers, research publishers, and niche B2B players. This is because they never had the budgets to brute-force awareness, and they were forced to behave like answer-native businesses long before we started talking about Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO).
They’ve also published deep, specific content that actually helps people choose, troubleshoot, and buy and they’ve built up track records in forums like Reddit, on YouTube, and on other niche sites.
When an AI is asked, “Which product should I buy?” or “What’s the best way to solve this?” it is more likely to cite these focused, expert voices than the household names who relied on broad, generic branding.
For challengers, this is a gift. You can’t outspend the category leader, but you can out-answer them. You can be cleaner, clearer, more consistent and more up-to-date across the surfaces the models rely on. You can also be obsessive about the details incumbents overlook.
Three big shifts are required to make a serious dent
The first thing brands need to do to grab the AEO advantage is to organise around depth of answer, not breadth of exposure.
This is a game of detail, not volume and your SEO, PR, paid and content teams cannot operate in silos. Brands need a golden thread of expertise that runs through everything they do. The solution relies on three strategies:
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First you need to appoint a clear AEO owner. This is generally a strategist with system thinking who has a line into every division and a mandate to orchestrate them. If you bolt AEO onto SEO alone, you will default to treating this as a website problem, and you will miss most of the opportunity.
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Second, you need to aggressively optimise what you already have instead of chasing shiny new things. YouTube is the perfect example. The platform is one of the most cited sources for large models and one of the easiest to fix. Most brands don’t need 100 new videos, they need to audit the last 12 months of performance and overhaul the top pieces.
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Third, you draw a hard line between what you automate and what stays human. Use AI to industrialise the mechanics such as heading structures, FAQ schemas, internal linking, detecting outdated stats, maintaining consistency across channels. But you should certainly keep your original data, your unique point of view, and your judgement, firmly human-led.
The fastest way to lose in the AI race is to rely on generic AI output and erase the very expertise you’re trying to prove.
In an answer economy, the work you do now is the signal models will surface a year from now. If you’re not urgently rewriting that story today, you’re accepting that someone else’s answer will define your brand tomorrow.
* Summary created by AI
Jessica Jacobs is managing director, Northern Europe and DACH, at Incubeta.
