AI Visibility for CMOs: What Every Big Brand Needs to Know

Why does AI visibility have to start now?

Adoption is compounding fast, and it doesn’t matter whether you sell to consumers or to other businesses — your buyers are already doing this. L.E.K. Consulting found that AI shoppers are increasingly skipping the search bar entirely — the share who start their product research on a standalone tool like ChatGPT or Perplexity nearly doubled from 25% in 2024 to 46% in 2026, overtaking traditional search, which fell from 43% to 24% (L.E.K., April 2026). For those buyers, the first impression of your brand forms inside an AI answer, before your website, your ads, or your sales team get a word in.

The channel is growing just as fast. Adobe Analytics measured generative-AI referral traffic to US retail sites up roughly 700% year-over-year during the 2025 holiday season. A year earlier, that traffic barely registered on anyone’s dashboard.

If you’re B2B, it’s further along, not less. Forrester’s State of Business Buying, 2026 — a survey of nearly 18,000 buyers — found GenAI chatbots are now the single most influential source shaping B2B vendor shortlists (17.1%), ahead of software review sites, vendor websites, and peer recommendations, with 94% of buyers using genAI in their purchase process, up from 89% a year earlier. So for B2B buyers, the AI is increasingly building the shortlist itself — and if your brand isn’t in the sources it pulls from, you don’t make the list.

The reason timing matters this much is that there’s no settled playbook yet. The space is new, best practices are surfacing in real time, and what works keeps shifting — which engine leads, how it picks sources, what it trusts. The advantage goes to whoever’s plugged into those learnings as they emerge, adjusting as the rules move instead of guessing in isolation or waiting for a playbook that won’t sit still. Start now and you build a baseline and a position you can keep tuning, because you’re in it while it forms. Wait, and you’re catching up to a moving target from zero — and that climb gets more expensive every quarter, in the work it takes and in how much harder the budget line is to justify once you’re visibly behind.

Isn’t this just SEO with a new name?

It overlaps, and a good SEO foundation still helps. But no, it’s a different game. SEO gets a page of yours to rank. AI visibility gets your brand named and recommended inside an answer the AI writes — which means it has to know who you are, trust what it knows, and decide you’re relevant to that exact question. It assembles that from your site, but also from third-party sources across the whole web. A brand can dominate organic search and still be invisible in AI, because the AI is reading the internet’s whole opinion of you, not just the page you optimized. (If you’re weighing who should own this, I wrote a full breakdown of AEO vs. SEO here.)

What are the five questions every CMO should be able to answer?

You don’t need to know the mechanics of fixing each one. You need to be able to ask them and not get a blank stare back. If your team can’t answer these today, that’s the gap.

1. When our buyers ask AI about our category, do we show up — and is what it says about us actually true?

2. Which decisions in our funnel are already being made inside an AI answer, before anyone reaches us?

3. What does AI think we’re known for — and is that what we want to be known for?

4. Where does AI pull its answers from in our category, and are we present in those places?

5. Who owns this internally, and how do we measure it when our own analytics can’t see the moment it happens?

That last one is where most brands stall, so let’s sit on it.

What does AI visibility do to your team and org chart?

This doesn’t map cleanly onto any one seat you already have. It’s not “give it to SEO,” and it’s not PR’s or social’s either. AI reads across all of them at once, so the work cuts across all of them — which in most orgs means it belongs to everyone, and so it belongs to no one.

If you decide to build this in-house, here’s who you actually need. Someone who can:

• Read across SEO, PR, content, social, community, and product — because AI reads across all of them, and a fix in one place gets undone by silence in another.
• Monitor five-plus different AI engines that each choose and cite sources differently, and re-check them constantly because the behavior shifts month to month.
• Speak both languages — the technical side (schema, structured data, site architecture) and the editorial side (what you’re known for and how that gets corroborated on third-party sources off your own site).
• Tell a mention from a citation and know why the difference changes what you do next.
• Re-learn the field every quarter, on purpose, because the playbook from six months ago is already partly wrong.

Read that list again and notice what it describes: a senior, cross-functional hire whose whole job is staying current in a field that reinvents itself quarterly. Not a task you bolt onto your SEO manager’s plate. For scale, a seasoned SEO director already runs around $120K base (PayScale, 2026), and adding real AI-search ownership pushes that another 15–25% — which is why GEO/AEO has gone from rare to a named seat on roughly 38% of in-house SEO teams in two years. This is turning into its own budget line, not a favor someone does on Fridays. And even the right hire needs three to six months to get current on a landscape this new and fast-moving — so your quarterly report won’t show real movement on AI visibility for a couple of cycles after they start.

Most brands don’t have that person yet, and can’t justify a dedicated seat for it — the category’s too new to have its own headcount. That’s the real decision in front of you.

So do you build it in-house or bring someone in?

Here’s how I’d actually think about it, and I’ll be straight even though it’s my own offer on the table.

If you build in-house, make sure you have someone who can genuinely do everything on that list — and, more importantly, someone with the time to keep doing the last item. Staying current here isn’t a quarterly check-in. It’s close to a full-time job on its own, because what changes isn’t your strategy — it’s the ground under it. New engines, new citation behavior, new source preferences, every few weeks. If the person you assign this to also has a day job, the “stay current” part is the first thing to slip, and you’re back to flying blind six months later.

If you bring me in, it’s usually two moves:

1. A 4–6 week intensive to build the strategy. It starts with real business discovery — your organization, your industry, your buyers, how you’re positioned in the market — because the foundations of AI visibility hold for everyone, but how a given brand should implement them doesn’t. I map where you stand across the engines, find where AI sources its answers about your category, and turn all of it into a prioritized plan your team can execute. And the moves that come out of it often aren’t ones that would’ve made it onto a whiteboard in a traditional brainstorm — a Reddit or community program in the third-party sources AI leans on, or a chain of indirect signals that point back to you a few steps removed. Nobody was sticky-noting community programs and three-degrees-of-separation strategies before AI made them the thing that moves the answer. Translating that general playbook into the right moves for your specific business is the part that takes a senior strategist rather than a checklist — and it’s the whole reason to bring someone in.
2. A lighter retainer to keep it current — the part that’s hardest to replicate in-house. Staying on top of this space is my full-time job, and I’m doing it across a whole roster of brands in different industries at once. So when something starts working for one client, I see it early and can bring it to the others — you get the benefit of everyone’s learnings, not just your own trial and error. That’s the compounding edge a single in-house hire can’t match: one brand watching one industry will always learn slower than one strategist watching many.

That’s the honest math. Some brands are big enough to justify the full-time hire — if that’s you, hire well, and I’ll happily tell you what to look for. Most aren’t there yet, and for them a sharp strategy plus someone whose actual job is staying current beats a smart generalist fitting it in around everything else.

What do the first 90 days actually look like?

Without giving away the whole method: it starts with getting deep on the business — your org, your market, how you’re positioned — alongside an honest audit of where you stand across the AI engines, because the right strategy depends on both. From there it’s finding which third-party sources AI pulls from in your category, deciding what you want to be known for, and prioritizing the handful of moves that actually shift the answer in your favor — chosen for your business, not from a generic checklist. Then you measure it on the surfaces your normal analytics can’t see.

The brands that get ahead here aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones that started asking the five questions while their competitors were still admiring their green arrows.

I’m Laura Seelinger, founder of LSX Partners, and AI visibility strategy is the whole thing I do. If reading this made you realize you can’t actually answer those five questions yet — that’s exactly the conversation to have.

Sources

• L.E.K. Consulting, “Thanks to AI, Consumers Are Arriving at Brand and Retailer Sites Ready to Buy” — April 2026 survey of 2,650 U.S. consumers. Among AI-using shoppers, standalone AI is now the top starting point for product research (46%, up from 25% in 2024; traditional search fell to 24%).
• Forrester, “The State of Business Buying, 2026” — January 2026, survey of ~18,000 buyers. GenAI chatbots are the single most influential B2B vendor-shortlist source (17.1%); 94% of buyers used genAI in their purchase process, up from 89% in 2025.
• Adobe Analytics, 2025 holiday shopping report — generative-AI referral traffic to U.S. retail sites up roughly 700% year-over-year during the 2025 holiday season (reported January 2026).
• PayScale, SEO Director salary (2026) and Analyze.ai, “SEO Salary Survey 2026” (May 2026) — SEO director base ~$120K; a 15–25% pay premium for AI-search ownership; GEO/AEO now a named role on ~38% of in-house SEO teams.