According to Fortune, AI is the first point of contact for product discovery. Brands that don’t appear in AI-generated responses risk being overlooked before a customer even visits their website.
Fortune reported on July 14, 2026, that Adobe saw a 200% increase in brand mentions for products like Acrobat and Firefly after using an internal measurement tool to track its AI visibility.
Adobe Analytics reported that generative AI traffic to U.S. retail sites increased by 3,500% in May 2025 compared to July 2024. This means the shift is not forthcoming; it is already here.
Most small businesses are unaware of how AI models perceive their brand, or if they are being mentioned at all. This blind spot is costing them discovery that they can’t yet measure.
There is a free, 60-second method to check your AI visibility right now. It also allows you to compare yourself to competitors without the need for a large budget or a data team.
The rules of brand discovery have quietly changed, and most businesses didn’t get the message.
Marketing teams have been so focused on rankings and click-through rates, they might not have noticed that AI-powered interfaces have begun to answer customer queries directly. They recommend products, name service providers, and shape purchase decisions before a single search result is ever clicked. The brands that appear in those answers are gaining consideration without having to earn it through a website visit. The ones that don’t appear are being filtered out of the conversation entirely.
For this very moment, EthosM2’s Catalyst Pro was created. This Digital PR and amplification engine is part of the FOCAS Amplification stage. But before we discuss what you can do today, it’s important to understand what one of the world’s most advanced marketing organizations has just confirmed about the future of brand discovery.
Fortune 500 Boardrooms Have a New Playbook
Adobe’s CMO Lara Balazs didn’t just observe the shift — she created a system to quantify it. As Fortune reported on July 14, 2026, Balazs and her team saw a decrease in traditional search traffic and made a strategic choice: stop waiting for the data to come in from old analytics tools and start monitoring AI-created brand mentions directly.
Why Big Brands Are Moving Their Budget From SEO to AI Visibility
It’s not rocket science. If the first time your customer encounters a category is now within ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Mode — not on a search results page — then optimizing solely for search rankings means you’re knocking on the wrong door. Big brand marketing leaders get this, and the budget is being redirected accordingly.
According to Fortune, marketing heads have noticed a quantifiable decrease in traffic and revenue that was once reliably driven by search, as product discovery is now being driven by AI interfaces. Brands that do not appear in AI-generated recommendations are not just at risk of lower traffic, but also risk being excluded from consideration before a customer even visits their website.
Adobe’s Shift Indicates a Wider Industry Change
It’s not a trend when a Fortune 500 CMO restructures her marketing measurement system around AI visibility, it’s a sign. What Adobe did in-house is what every dedicated marketing team will eventually need to do: comprehend how AI models see and portray their brand, and deliberately optimize for that perception.
Adobe’s Observations When Search Traffic Decreased
The initial warning signs were not obvious. Organic traffic started to decrease. The conversion paths that used to go smoothly from search to the landing page began to fail. The number of searches was not necessarily decreasing — but the behavior of those who were searching was changing in ways that traditional dashboards could not clearly explain. For more insights, explore this guide on Generative Engine Optimization.
As it turns out, the answer was right under our noses the entire time, sitting on the search results page.
Brand Discovery Is Subtly Being Depleted by Zero-Click Searches
Just as the name suggests, a zero-click search is when a user enters a search query, receives a response from an AI summary or featured result, and never actually clicks on any website. The search took place. The discovery took place. Your brand was just not involved.
Data from the Pew Research Center in July 2025 makes this clear. When users encountered an AI summary on a search results page, they clicked on a traditional search result in just 8% of visits, compared to 15% when there was no AI summary. That’s almost half the click-through rate, reduced simply by the presence of an AI-generated answer. And 26% of users ended their browsing session entirely after seeing a page with an AI summary, compared to 16% without one.
Click Drain is Already Measurable and Increasing
The Pew study found that about 18% of Google searches in their study resulted in an AI summary. That number will go up. And each percentage point of increase represents another piece of discovery that completely bypasses your website – unless your brand is the one being mentioned in the summary.
Adobe Claims a 200% Increase in Visibility
At this point, Adobe’s tale transitions from cautionary to instructional. Instead of resigning themselves to diminishing organic metrics, Adobe’s team devised a solution: a tool specifically designed to monitor the frequency of their product mentions within AI-generated responses — and then leverage that information to enhance those mentions.
As per Fortune, CMO Lara Balazs reported that the outcome was a doubling in brand visibility for products such as Acrobat and Firefly. This is not a minor enhancement. This is a fundamental shift in how a corporate brand appears in the locations where customers are now looking first.
The LLM Optimizer: Adobe’s New Tool
What Adobe’s LLM Optimizer Does
Adobe’s LLM Optimizer is a cutting-edge tool designed to enhance brand visibility in AI-generated content. By leveraging advanced algorithms, this tool ensures that Adobe’s brand is accurately represented in large language models. For more details on how this tool is revolutionizing brand discovery, check out the article on Adobe’s brand discovery tool.
|
Function |
What It Tracks |
Business Outcome |
|---|---|---|
|
AI Citation Monitoring |
How often Adobe products appear in AI-generated responses |
Identifies which products have high vs. low AI visibility |
|
Response Quality Analysis |
How accurately AI models describe Adobe products |
Surfaces misrepresentations or gaps in AI knowledge |
|
Optimization Feedback Loop |
Content and signal changes that influence AI citations |
Enables deliberate improvement of AI brand presence |
|
Visibility Benchmarking |
Brand presence relative to category competitors in AI answers |
Reveals competitive gaps in AI-driven discovery |
Adobe created a tool they named LLM Optimizer specifically to monitor and enhance the frequency of their products appearing in AI-generated responses. This was not a solution that could be purchased — it was constructed in-house by a team of enterprise-level employees to address a problem of enterprise-level measurement. As reported by Fortune, Balazs referred to it as a method to ensure that Adobe’s products remained visible as the behavior of customer discovery transitioned to AI interfaces.
While the tool isn’t something that a small business can license or replicate with a weekend project, the insight it produced is directly applicable at any scale. The tool showed that tracking AI citations and acting on that data produces measurable visibility gains.
Adobe demonstrated with a custom enterprise build that any brand can begin to comprehend with the right diagnostic. The gap doesn’t exist in the concept. It’s in having a starting point.
How Adobe Increased Its Visibility by Tracking AI Citations
Adobe didn’t increase its visibility by 200% by spending more on advertising. Instead, they identified where AI models were missing or underrepresenting their products and made deliberate changes to fix those gaps. They measured first, then improved. As Balazs said, they wanted to make sure that Adobe’s products were part of “the AI-generated answers that customers see first.” For businesses wondering why their business isn’t showing up in AI-generated answers, understanding these gaps is crucial.
Understanding “Share of Voice” in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, and Google AI Mode
In the world of traditional search, the term “share of voice” referred to how often your brand appeared in relation to a specific set of tracked keywords compared to your competitors. In the realm of AI-driven discovery, the comparable metric is how often an AI model mentions, cites, or recommends your brand when a user asks a relevant question. This happens across multiple platforms at the same time.
This is a completely different challenge when it comes to measurement. A brand could be on the first page of Google and still be completely absent from the AI answers that now come before or replace those rankings. For brands looking to ensure their presence in AI-driven search results, understanding generative engine optimization is crucial. The platforms where this is most relevant currently include:
Here are the platforms that are increasingly using AI:
- ChatGPT — used increasingly for product research, comparisons, and service recommendations
- Perplexity — a citation-heavy AI search engine that pulls directly from authoritative web sources
- Microsoft Copilot — integrated into Microsoft 365 and Bing, influencing enterprise and consumer discovery
- Google AI Mode — Google’s native AI-generated answer layer, now appearing on a significant share of searches per Pew Research Center
Each of these platforms has its own model, its own training data, and its own logic for deciding which brands it trusts enough to name. To show up consistently across all of these platforms requires a different kind of authority than traditional SEO alone can provide.
Breaking Down the Shift
Generative AI Traffic to Retail Sites Skyrockets 3,500%
This shift is anything but subtle. Adobe Analytics found that traffic to U.S. retail websites from generative AI sources surged 3,500% in May 2025 compared to July 2024. Travel sites experienced a 3,200% uptick over the same period. These aren’t gradual adoption curves — they’re category-level shifts in discovery.
- Retail sites: 3,500% increase in generative AI referral traffic (May 2025 vs. July 2024) — Adobe Analytics
- Travel sites: 3,200% increase over the same period — Adobe Analytics
- AI summaries present: click-through to traditional results drops to 8% from 15% — Pew Research Center, July 2025
- Session endings: 26% of users stop browsing entirely after an AI summary page, versus 16% without — Pew Research Center, July 2025
What makes these numbers significant isn’t just their size — it’s what they represent structurally. AI-referred traffic isn’t supplementing traditional search traffic. In many categories, it’s replacing it. Brands that built their entire discovery funnel around organic search rankings are now operating a funnel with a widening hole at the top.
The companies that will survive this change are the ones that grasp it early enough to take action. And taking action begins with understanding where you are — specifically, whether AI models are mentioning your brand at all when customers ask questions in your category.
Pew’s Findings on Clicks After AI Summaries
The Pew Research Center’s July 2025 findings have completely changed the conversation about click-through rates. The problem is not that your content is underperforming, but that the search results page is now doing the job that your website used to do. When an AI summary answers the user’s question before they can scroll to your listing, the click simply does not occur. This is not because the user was not interested, but because the AI already gave them what they were looking for, and it may or may not have been from your brand.
What AI Traffic Growth Means for Your Business
Adobe Analytics reported a 3,500% increase in retail traffic coming from AI. That traffic is going to the websites of brands that AI models trust enough to recommend. For every brand that gets that traffic, there are competitors that were passed over — not penalized, not outranked, just not included in the answer. Not being included is the new penalty in AI-driven discovery.
Not being in the AI’s response means you’re out of the game
The situation here is simple. In the old search method, being on the second page meant less visibility but not no visibility. In AI discovery, the model gives one answer — sometimes it cites sources, sometimes it doesn’t — and brands that aren’t in that answer don’t exist for that user at that time. There’s no second page in an AI response.
On July 14, 2026, Fortune magazine reported that brands that do not appear in AI-generated recommendations run the risk of being eliminated from consideration before a customer even visits their website. This is not a drop in ranking, but a structural removal from the discovery process at its earliest and most influential stage. For businesses wondering why their business isn’t showing up in AI platforms, this is a critical issue to address.
How AI Models Choose Which Brands to Mention
Most of the time, AI language models don’t surf the web in real time to generate responses. Instead, they rely on training data, crawled content, and sometimes retrieval-augmented systems that draw from indexed sources. In practical terms, this means that a brand’s visibility in AI is mainly determined by how well-documented, authoritative, and consistently represented the brand is on the internet — in ways that AI systems can understand and trust.
There are several signals that influence AI citation behavior. These include third-party mentions on authoritative domains, structured and semantically clear web content, consistent entity information across platforms, and the depth of topical coverage a brand maintains in its category. A brand that has strong traditional SEO is already ahead of the game. However, these signals alone do not guarantee AI inclusion. This is especially true as models increasingly weight factors that go beyond standard page ranking criteria.
Why Traditional SEO Signals Still Matter — But Aren’t Enough on Their Own
Domain authority, backlink quality, and on-page optimization aren’t irrelevant in the AI era — they’re foundational. AI models are more likely to cite sources that already carry credibility signals the internet has validated over time. A brand with zero SEO foundation is unlikely to appear in AI answers for competitive queries. In that sense, everything you’ve built through SEO still matters, as highlighted by Adobe’s launch of a brand visibility tool.
However, authority is not the only determining factor. AI models also consider the clarity of the content, the completeness of the topic, and the consistency of the brand’s information across trusted third-party sources. Even if a brand has excellent domain authority, it can still be invisible in AI responses if its content does not provide AI models with enough clean, structured signals to work with. This gap – between your SEO authority and your actual AI citation rate – is exactly what the right diagnostic can reveal.
What Every Business Owner Should Be Asking: Is My Business Visible to AI?
It’s common for owners of small to mid-sized businesses to check their Google rankings. Many have even run an SEO audit. But there’s a question that few have asked, but is becoming increasingly important: when a potential customer asks their AI assistant for a recommendation in my category, is my business mentioned?
For most businesses, the truth is that they don’t know. It’s not that they’re doing poorly, they just don’t know. And not knowing is a problem when AI-generated answers are actively influencing purchasing decisions across retail, travel, professional services, and almost every other category with online discovery behavior.
The table below shows that relying on a single SEO tool will not give you the full picture. Each discovery channel has its own logic for inclusion. AI-generated answers operate on a completely different set of rules than the ones your current analytics stack was built to track.
Discovery Channel
How Your Brand Is Found
What Determines Inclusion
Measurement Tool
Traditional Search (Google)
User clicks a ranked listing
Domain authority, on-page SEO, backlinks
Google Search Console, rank trackers
AI-Generated Answers
AI names or cites your brand in its response
Entity clarity, topical authority, third-party validation, structured content
AI visibility diagnostics, citation tracking
AI with Citations (Perplexity)
Your content is pulled as a source reference
Domain trust, content relevance, crawlability by AI bots
Backlink audits + AI citation monitoring
The Consequences of Your Brand Being Overlooked by AI
There’s no way to see it — therein lies the issue. When AI overlooks your brand, you don’t receive a notification, an alert about a drop in ranking, or a traffic penalty that you can identify. You simply aren’t a part of the discussions that are directly influencing customer decisions. The competitors that do appear gain consideration, trust, and eventually conversions that you were completely unaware you could have won. Learn more about why your business isn’t showing up in AI tools.
How AI Citations Differ from Google Rankings
When you rank on Google, your page shows up on a list. When you’re cited by AI, an AI model has determined that your brand is a reliable, pertinent response to a particular inquiry — and has relayed that to a user directly, frequently without necessitating a click. One is a spot on a page. The other is an endorsement. The buying psychology of these two encounters is not identical.
What the Free Authority Diagnostic Measures
The Catalyst Pro Authority Diagnostic is a free, 60-second assessment that runs on live Ahrefs data to give you a real-time read on where your brand stands — not just in traditional search authority, but in the signals that drive AI search visibility. It benchmarks your brand against competitors, so you’re not looking at your numbers in a vacuum. You’re seeing the gap between where you are and where the brands being cited ahead of you actually stand.
Adobe’s framework suggests that you should first measure and then optimize. The diagnostic provides the initial measurement without the need for an enterprise team, a custom-made tool, or a contract for six-figure analytics. Run your free 60-second Authority Diagnostic and see your SEO authority, AI visibility, and Authority Gap → For more details on this tool, you can read about Adobe’s brand visibility tool.
Understanding the Authority Ceiling and the Authority Gap
The Authority Ceiling is the highest level of AI and organic search visibility your brand can realistically attain given its current domain strength, content depth, and third-party validation profile. It’s not a hard cap — it’s a diagnostic benchmark that lets you know how much room you have to grow before you encounter structural constraints that necessitate more foundational work. The Authority Gap is the space between your current visibility and that ceiling — specifically measured against the competitors who are already appearing where you are not. These two metrics combined provide you with a precise, actionable starting point rather than a vague idea that you should “create more content” or “build more links.”
What the Diagnostic Examines in AI Citation Patterns
The diagnostic checks the primary signals that determine whether AI models recognize and mention your brand in their responses. This includes your domain authority score, how deeply your brand is covered in your category, the quality and number of third-party mentions on authoritative external domains, and how clearly AI crawlers can understand your web content. These aren’t vague measurements — they’re the exact factors that decide whether a language model has enough clear, consistent information about your brand to confidently include you in an answer.
Why AI Bots Crawling Your Site Is Different Than Search Indexing
Just because Google has indexed your site doesn’t mean that AI systems can effectively read and understand your content. Search indexing simply confirms that a page exists and can be ranked. AI crawlability, on the other hand, determines whether the content on that page is structured clearly enough for a language model to accurately extract information about your brand, products, or services and attribute it correctly.
There are numerous sites that rank highly in conventional search but have content that AI systems find unclear. This could be due to inconsistent entity naming, limited topic coverage, or page structures that hide crucial information in formats that language models don’t understand well. Even if a site is fully indexed, it can still be effectively invisible to the AI systems that are increasingly responsible for brand discovery.
When brands start to really look into their AI visibility, they often find something that seems to go against common sense. Having a high Google ranking can make you feel safe when you really shouldn’t. This tool shows you this gap in a straightforward way. It shows you both your traditional authority and the signals that specifically affect AI citation behavior. This way, you aren’t making decisions based on incomplete information.
Big Business Problem, Small Business Solution
Adobe’s solution to AI visibility was created for a huge business – a dedicated internal tool, a team to run it, and the infrastructure of a Fortune 500 marketing organization to back every decision. This isn’t the reality for most businesses, and it doesn’t have to be. The main point that Adobe acted on can be applied to any business: measure where your brand stands in AI-generated answers, identify the gap, and close it deliberately.
Adobe’s situation is not different from yours in terms of strategy. The difference lies in the starting point. Adobe had to begin with a custom-built measurement system because there were no other options available at their scale. However, you can begin with a free diagnostic that will provide you with the same foundational read in about 60 seconds. This includes your authority score, your competitive benchmark, and your AI visibility gap.
- Know your Authority Ceiling — understand the realistic upper limit of your current AI and organic visibility based on your existing domain strength
- Identify your Authority Gap — see exactly how far behind the brands currently being cited ahead of you in AI answers you actually are
- Benchmark against real competitors — your numbers only mean something when measured against the brands competing for the same AI-generated recommendations
- Get a tailored strategy direction — not generic advice, but a compliance-friendly path built around your specific gaps and competitive position
None of that requires an enterprise budget. It requires a starting measurement — which is exactly what the diagnostic provides.
Brands that will see 2025 and 2026 as pivotal years in their growth are the ones who viewed AI visibility as a quantifiable, controllable business factor instead of a nebulous technical issue to be addressed later. Measurement is the key to everything else.
How Small and Mid-Sized Brands Can Use Adobe’s Framework Without Enterprise Tools
Adobe’s framework boils down to three steps: monitor your current AI visibility, pinpoint where competitors are beating you in AI-generated answers, and make strategic enhancements to the signals that influence citation behavior. A small or mid-sized business can implement that same sequence — beginning with a free diagnostic to set the baseline, then moving through the Authority Gap findings to prioritize the most impactful improvements first. The size of the tools is different. The reasoning is the same.
How to Handle Your Diagnostic Results Right Away
As soon as you receive your diagnostic results, the first figure to pay attention to is the Authority Gap. This represents the difference between your current visibility profile and the competitors who are already appearing in AI answers in your category. A wide gap doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in a bad position. Instead, it means you have a clearly defined goal and a quantifiable distance to make up.
The next thing to consider is where the greatest discrepancy lies. If your domain authority is solid but your AI visibility signals are lacking, the focus should be on content structure and third-party entity validation. If both are lacking, building foundational authority is the first step. The diagnostic provides a custom, compliance-friendly strategic direction based on your unique profile, so the next step isn’t a shot in the dark.
It is not advisable to view the diagnostic as a one-off event. AI model training data is constantly changing, as is the visibility of competitors, and the platforms that are most important for AI-driven discovery. The diagnostic provides a snapshot – a specific, data-driven starting point – and the strategy it identifies is intended to increase visibility over time, rather than just a brief surge.
Get Your Free Checkup
Adobe created a unique enterprise tool to solve a single problem: where does our brand appear when AI creates a response? The subsequent 200% increase in visibility wasn’t a fluke — it was the outcome of having a measurement system in place and taking action based on its findings. Every brand now requires that initial assessment. For more details, check out Adobe’s brand visibility tool for AI search.
The Catalyst Pro Authority Diagnostic is a free tool that takes about a minute to give you a snapshot of your brand’s online presence. It uses real-time data from Ahrefs to compare your brand to your actual competitors. It also identifies your Authority Ceiling and Authority Gap and provides a custom strategy for closing the gap. This applies to both organic search and AI-driven discovery.
What You Get from the Free Diagnostic in 60 Seconds
|
Metric |
What It Tells You |
Why It Matters for AI Visibility |
|---|---|---|
|
SEO Authority Score |
Your current domain authority based on live Ahrefs data |
AI models weight brand citations toward higher-authority domains |
|
AI Visibility Read |
How your brand signals appear relative to AI citation patterns |
Reveals whether your content structure supports AI model recognition |
|
Authority Ceiling |
The realistic visibility ceiling given your current profile |
Sets a benchmark for what’s achievable before structural work is needed |
|
Authority Gap |
The gap between you and competitors showing up in AI answers |
Pinpoints exactly how much ground to close and where to start |
|
Tailored Strategy Direction |
A compliance-friendly growth path built around your specific gaps |
Eliminates guesswork and prioritizes the highest-impact actions first |
Understanding your Authority Ceiling is crucial for setting realistic benchmarks for your online visibility.
Commonly Asked Questions
These are the questions that business owners and marketing decision-makers often ask when they first learn about AI brand visibility — and what it actually means for their business at the moment.
What Is AI Brand Visibility and Why Is It Important?
AI brand visibility is the extent to which your brand shows up in the responses produced by AI-powered interfaces — like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, and Microsoft Copilot — and how accurately it does so. It’s important because these platforms have become a main source of product and service recommendations. As Fortune points out, brands that don’t show up in AI-generated recommendations run the risk of being left out of the customer’s decision-making process before the customer even visits their website. Being visible in AI responses isn’t something to worry about in the future — it’s a factor in the competition right now.
What Makes AI Brand Visibility Tracking Different From Traditional SEO Tracking?
When it comes to traditional SEO tracking, it’s all about where you rank in the search results. But AI visibility tracking is a whole different ball game. It’s not about where you rank, but whether your brand is being mentioned, cited, or recommended within a generated answer. So, even if you’re in the top three on Google, you could be nowhere to be found in AI-generated answers in your category. That’s why these two metrics can be vastly different, and why they need to be tracked separately using the right tools for each job.
What platforms does AI brand visibility cover?
AI brand visibility covers any platform where a language model generates answers to user queries. As AI capabilities are embedded into more search and discovery interfaces, this list continues to grow. The platforms currently driving the most meaningful discovery behavior include AI search engines.
- ChatGPT — product research, comparisons, and service provider recommendations across consumer and B2B use cases
- Perplexity — citation-based AI search that pulls directly from indexed web sources, making third-party mentions especially valuable
- Google AI Mode — native AI answer layer integrated into Google Search, appearing on approximately 18% of searches per Pew Research Center’s July 2025 findings
- Microsoft Copilot — AI-powered recommendations embedded across Bing and Microsoft 365, influencing both consumer and enterprise discovery
Can Small Businesses Realistically Compete With Enterprise Brands in AI Answers?
Yes — particularly at the local and category-specific level. AI models don’t only generate answers about global brands. They respond to queries about local services, regional providers, niche product categories, and specialized expertise — areas where a well-positioned small business with strong topical authority and clean entity signals can outperform a larger competitor that hasn’t invested in AI visibility. The key is knowing where your Authority Gap is smallest and concentrating your effort there first, which is exactly what the diagnostic is designed to surface.
How Frequently Should I Monitor My Brand’s AI Visibility?
The bare minimum is quarterly, but the truth is that your AI visibility should be a continuously tracked metric, not a one-time checkup. AI models are retrained and updated on different schedules. New competitors join the competition. The platforms that generate AI-referred traffic change in relative importance. A visibility read that was correct three months ago may not represent how AI systems are mentioning brands in your category today.
With the free diagnostic, you can establish a trustworthy starting point. When you start addressing the Authority Gap findings, it’s important to keep an eye on your progress to ensure that your efforts are leading to noticeable visibility improvements — just like Adobe did when they increased their visibility by 200%.
It’s not always the brands with the deepest pockets that are succeeding in AI-driven discovery. It’s the brands that started measuring first and took action based on their findings. Starting with your 60-second baseline is the best first step.
Catalyst Pro from EthosM2 is designed to assist brands in reducing their Authority Gap. This is accomplished through Digital PR and amplification strategies that build the type of third-party authority that AI models can trust enough to cite. Learn more about Digital PR measurement frameworks that can enhance your brand’s authority. Check out your free Authority Diagnostic now to see where your brand stands →
