shift is happening faster than most retailers realise. Capgemini found 58 per cent of shoppers have already replaced traditional search with gen AI for product recommendations – even higher among younger demographics,” Mal Chia, co-founder of Ecom Nation and a digital marketing expert, told Inside Retail. “Brands need to think beyond SEO. Structure your content to be easily interpretable by AI algorithms so you’re more likely to be featured in AI-generated recommendations,” Chia added. A shift from SEO to AI visibility A 2025 report by Leoprd, a strategic advisory firm specialising in AI visibility, details this alteration in how brands are being discovered today. According to the Leo Insights Report 2025, nearly half of Australians now use generative AI tools to make purchasing decisions, highlighting a substantial evolution in how consumers are engaging with brands. “We’ve gone from 20 years of Google dominance to now, receiving these summaries of recommendations, and they are trusted by people,” Celia Harding, founder of Leoprd, explained in an interview with Inside Retail. “For a brand, it’s really important that it’s showing up in those responses,” she added. Harding added that traditional SEO methods, which focus on optimising for search engines like Google, are becoming less effective as AI algorithms take the lead. How AI platforms determine brand visibility Different generative AI platforms evaluate brands in their own unique ways, and this can add complexity to the challenge for businesses. ChatGPT places a focus on media coverage, expert opinions and awards when recommending brands, with editorial coverage receiving up to 33 per cent of the overall weighting, according to the Leo report. The same report reveals Perplexity prioritises reviews and CoPilot leans heavily on structured data and reviews to make its recommendations. This diversity reinforces the need for businesses to ensure they appear across a wide range of third-party sources, from editorial coverage to customer reviews. “The biggest challenge is monitoring in a hyper-personalised AI world. What I see when asking about your brand could be completely different from what another user sees based on our different histories and preferences,” Chia explained. With AI becoming a trusted filter for consumers, marketing and PR experts advise businesses to align their content with what AI platforms consider credible and relevant.  Optimising content for AI crawling standards can ensure that platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity can properly assess and recommend brand content and products.  “It is really important that your site contains the right information and can be crawled and indexed properly,” Harding advised. Steps FMCG and retail businesses can take FMCG and retail businesses can adapt their digital strategies to remain competitive in the AI era in several key ways. Focusing on earned media, monitoring customer reviews and supporting credible publishers can ensure visibility in critical content spaces. “Credibility and authority are the new currency,” Chia explained. He highlighted three tactics that work. “First, actively solicit and showcase genuine customer reviews across multiple platforms relevant to your target audience. This provides quality, diverse content for AI to reference. Second, partner with leading influencers and experts in your space to create authoritative content. Gen AI tools heavily weigh expertise when determining what to recommend. Third, pursue industry awards and recognition. These third-party validations significantly boost your brand’s trustworthiness not just with consumers but with the algorithms that are evaluating your credibility,” he added. As businesses increasingly market to both humans and machines, they must be proactive in optimising their presence across AI-driven platforms to remain visible, credible and competitive in this new digital landscape.