AI Search visibility: how to get your brand recommended by LLMs

We know already that the top of funnel has changed.

And actually, a lot of the top of funnel, which is those really early informational slides, those really informational queries that people search when they're looking for a brand, they now often happen in AI answers.

And that means those awareness, those consideration stages, when people are actually searching, they used to actually be reading a lot more blogs.

They used to be navigating around different pages of our website.

Now we know ourselves, we do this on our favorite AI app, right? I do it on ChatGPT in my pocket.

My favorite AI at work is Claude, so I use Claude on my desktop.

You probably have your own favorites that you're using for this very thing too.

And we also know that users prefer AI Actually, in almost all situations, which if you think back to where we were five years ago, kind of feels a little bit crazy because we didn't even have chat GPT in the mainstream like we do now.

This is recent research from SimilarWeb, and it shows at which stages of the purchase journey people prefer AI tools to search engines.

And you can see here that AI tools is this big orange color and right through from discovery through to research and comparison and to actually then deciding where to purchase something and what the best price for that tool or that product or that service actually is.

It's AI tools that win every time.

And that is hugely influential in that initial discovery and getting ideas phase, which means AI is influencing purchase journeys right from the very beginning.

And we also know that AI influenced users as in people who have used AI and had a conversation with AI actually engage way more on a website as well.

So you can see in this graph, this is the yellow that AI influenced visits to a website and the blue is ones that have not been people who have not been on AI at all when they were searching and If you've been in AI, it's double the number of pages that you actually look at on the site.

Your number of page views is way higher.

You spend a lot more time on the site.

And the second is actually minutes that are spent on the site.

It's actually almost double the amount of minutes.

If you've read about a brand and learned about them in AI first, you're actually going to give a lot more time to the site.

And we know how our attention spans are, right? We know that Actually, the average user probably has five seconds.

In the first five seconds, they're deciding whether to stay on a web page, whether to stay on a website, whether they're interested in the information.

So actually having someone on your website for 12 minutes compared to five minutes is huge because then you have the opportunity to influence that purchase journey with your own website content and funnels significantly more than you would otherwise.

So ultimately, we want users who've been through AI.

And we know that AI referral revenue is growing for brands who are paying attention to it.

This is one of our clients in the finance and education space.