Search is no longer just about clicks—it’s about conversations. With the rise of AI-powered tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Bing Copilot, users are discovering information in radically new ways. These platforms summarize, synthesize and recommend content—often without users ever clicking a link. 

AI overviews are fundamentally changing user behavior, fragmenting discovery and forcing brands to rethink their web strategy. AI-generated summaries are increasingly occupying prime real estate on search engine results pages (SERPs), leaving fewer opportunities for traditional click-throughs. In fact, 74% of users now turn to AI tools instead of Google for information and 70% of B2B buyers say they’re less likely to trust a vendor if its AI-generated answers are inaccurate. 

Despite bold claims that “SEO is dead,” the truth is more nuanced. SEO is evolving. It remains foundational to how AI models understand and surface content. But to stay visible in this new landscape, brands must go beyond traditional tactics. Enter Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).  

AEO is a future-ready strategy that blends structured content, knowledge graph alignment and AI discoverability tactics to help brands appear in AI-generated responses. It’s not just about ranking anymore—it’s about being recognized, cited and trusted by AI. 

Why SEO Isn’t Dead—It’s Evolving 

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on the open web. That means your SEO-optimized content—structured, authoritative and well-linked—is still the raw material for AI-generated answers. 

Over the years, SEO has evolved from keyword stuffing to structured data, schema.org markup and semantic search. Now, AI is accelerating that evolution. Brands must ensure their content is not only crawlable but also interpretable by AI systems. 

In short: SEO is no longer just about ranking. It’s about being recognized and recommended by AI. 

The watch-out for brands today isn’t that SEO is dead—it’s that outdated or inaccurate content will quietly kill your credibility in AI-driven search.

From Search to Summarization: The Rise of AEO 

AEO is the next evolution of digital visibility. It’s a strategic approach to ensure your brand shows up accurately and prominently in AI-generated answers across platforms like Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity. 

A strong AEO solution requires: 

• Brand Embedding: Measuring how close your content is to high-value topics in AI models. 
• Entity Mapping & Schema Optimization: Ensuring your website’s content has structured data and brand’s information is correct in sources like Wikidata. 
• Content Optimization: Creating AI-friendly content that’s concise, structured and semantically rich. 
• Monitoring & Feedback: Tracking your brand’s presence in AI responses and correcting misinformation. Keeping that data at your fingertips through custom dashboards to showcase your brand’s visibility within LLMs and SOV against competitors.  

In a world where decisions are made without a click, AEO helps your brand stay visible, credible and competitive. 

The Rise of Multimodal Discovery 

Discovery isn’t just text-based anymore. Users now rely on: 

• Voice search (“What’s the best HR software for small teams?”) 
• Visual search (Google Lens, Pinterest) 
• Conversational interfaces (AI chatbots and assistants) 

This shift means brands must optimize across formats—text, images, video and structured data. Multimodal discoverability is the new baseline. 

What Brands Need to Do Now 

Audit Your Digital Footprint

LLMs are trained on what’s already online. Outdated, inaccurate, or off-brand content can hurt your discoverability and credibility. 

Action: Audit old blogs, press releases, backlinks and landing pages. Identify and fix content that no longer reflects your brand or is factually incorrect. 

Refresh and Structure Content

Use structured data (like schema.org) and emerging formats (like LLM.txt) to help AI understand your content. 

Action: Refactor key pages with clear headings, concise answers and semantic markup. Write for both humans and machines.  

Strengthen Domain Authority

AI models prioritize content from trusted sources. Being quoted, linked, or cited by high-authority domains boosts your visibility. 

Action: Revisit your PR, editorial and influencer strategies. Build authority signals across the web. 

Understand Your Brand’s Embedding

AI models organize knowledge in vector space. Understanding your brand’s “semantic distance” from key topics reveals content gaps and opportunities. 

Action: Use tools to visualize your brand’s position in AI models and identify where to create or consolidate content. 

SEO vs. AEO: A Strategic Comparison 

AEO doesn’t replace SEO—it builds on it. But it requires a shift in mindset: from optimizing for clicks to optimizing for answers. 

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Why Scenario Planning Is Essential for Modern Marketers in 2025

Today’s marketers often feel like they’re operating in patchy fog. Is a recession looming, or will the economy stabilize into a soft landing? Will “do more with less” be the corporate mantra for just a few quarters, or indefinitely? And what about emerging disruptions—from AI advancements and geopolitical shifts to volatile consumer behaviors?

The practical answer remains: modern marketers must embrace scenario planning to build agile, resilient strategies.

Scenario planning works. While marketing leaders and CMOs can’t predict the future, they can, and must, prepare for a range of potential outcomes.

The disruptions of the early 2020s underscored the importance of scenario planning. While few could have precisely forecasted events like a global pandemic or today’s rapid technology shifts, the companies that pivoted quickly—whether in media channels, messaging strategies, or customer experiences—came out ahead. For example, at Prophet, we advised a client to shift from out-of-home advertising to digital channels almost overnight, and counseled another to pivot from in-person incentives to free shipping and virtual experiences. Scenario planning workshops gave our clients the ability to anticipate these shifts and act nimbly, not reactively.

Today, uncertainty is a given, not a glitch. Markets, technologies, customer expectations, and competitive landscapes are evolving faster than ever. Scenario planning has evolved into a crucial strategic muscle that can mean the difference between surviving and thriving when new curveballs come.

Scenario Planning 3.0: A Modern Approach 

No one has a crystal ball. That’s why scenario planning has been around for ages. But marketing leaders who regularly scenario plan are better equipped to face ever-changing circumstances and drive more effective, efficient and resilient marketing plans.    

We used this approach to help Scoperta! launch its brand into the market with a buzz-worthy digital strategy. Our team brainstormed, deliberated and developed proactive solutions to ensure the business was prepared for scenarios as diverse as low site traffic, site traffic that didn’t convert, and even traffic that was converting but perhaps needed to spend more per transaction.    

We knew what we would do for each of these scenarios, even if we didn’t need to do it. And because we prepared for these potential outcomes from the onset, we were also better positioned to optimize the campaign for success.    

Modern scenario planning allows companies to proactively address scenarios that may jeopardize the ability to reach any prioritized goal. And each step of the scenario-planning approach leads to strategic outcomes that will help the marketing strategy thrive despite uncertainty.  

Three Steps to Take When Scenario Planning Your Next Marketing Strategy 

Think of scenario planning as a game. We developed a game board to help our clients develop effective scenario plans to help workshop specific scenarios and prepare for potential outcomes.

Here are three steps to take when scenario planning your next marketing initiative: 

1. Draft possible Scenarios for an Initial Discussion 

We recommend defining a short list of critical priorities for a specific marketing initiative rather than trying to scenario plan for every single objective. To ensure you are tapping into the right preferences, you should collaborate with a cross-disciplinary team of stakeholders across marketing, sales, customer experience, operations and product.   

Some common considerations include:    

• Low site traffic or site traffic declining    
• Site traffic is not converting to sales   
• Sales are resulting in low revenue    
• Slow velocity to conversion    
• Low customer engagement    
• Lack of return customers    
• Smaller size or value in shopping carts    

2. Add and Prioritize ideas Across Levers to Address Scenarios 

Once you have identified your key priorities, address the potential levers you can pull. Some examples for marketers include:    

• What would happen if we increased or shifted media spending?   
• If we changed the messaging, would that improve customer engagement?  
• Might we offer audiences different or more personalized incentives and offers?  
• Would a shift in loyalty and rewards make a difference?   
• Could we consider other channels, working with new influencers or product aggregators?  
• How about new content and social strategies?   
• Would increasing the number of touchpoints improve lead nurturing? 

3. Codify and Socialize the Contingency Plan 

How these initial plans are shared throughout the organization is essential. But it doesn’t stop there.  Additional sessions are often needed to follow up on hot topics and assign owners to chosen levers.   

Next, you should schedule a contingency planning session at the end of an agreed-upon time frame to evaluate performance data to date. Leaders might integrate the scenario decision process into regular performance reporting sessions, similar to how leaders integrate optimization sessions in conventional campaign management.   

During this phase of the scenario planning process, internal communication channels become critical tools. It’s essential to ensure all stakeholders, from supply chain partners to investors, are current on pivot-ready strategies.   

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Informed by the conversations we’ve had with CMOs across industries, this fourth installment from our Brand-Demand Love blog series explores how to integrate brand and demand marketing capabilities to win in a complex and dynamic landscape. 

Even in the most complimentary relationships, financial matters are often a source of significant stress. For brand and demand-gen marketing teams to achieve the fully integrated and highly productive marriage we have been describing so far in our series, they must address the potential friction points involving budgeting, investment and performance measurement.

Agreeing on big-picture goals and investment priorities is the first step, followed by defining metrics to track performance. Receptivity to new approaches and flexibility to adjust as needs change is also key. As our research with marketing leaders has made clear, these issues are critical to unleashing uncommon growth through more effective and agile marketing capabilities across the customer lifecycle. Brand and demand teams ultimately share a pocketbook and prosper (or struggle) together.

Building Balanced Budgets and Allocating Investments Equitably

Many marketing leaders confess to being “obsessed” with finding the right investment mix. There is no shortage of conventional wisdom on how to allocate budgets and balance the investment mix. One common industry standard is the 60/40 rule, an investment recommendation proposed by Binet & Field’s 2013 study. The thesis: Allocating 60% to brand and 40% to demand yields the most effective balance of near-term acquisition and long-term performance.

Such rules of thumb seem to offer quick, evidence-based solutions. They also help defend brand investments, as many marketers want—and feel an urgent need to do—as e-commerce and digital have gained the upper hand in budget battles. However, this may not fully account for the variables of consumer behavior, broader market trends or the unique business contexts faced by different organizations. Modeling investment and measurement decisions against product lifecycle stages (e.g., product launches, mature offerings) can help marketers track progress toward specific goals.

Marissa Jarratt, chief marketing officer of retailer 7-Eleven, seeks to manage marketing investments like a portfolio. She balances higher-risk bets that offer big potential upside while also making safer plays that bring more predictable returns. “This is becoming more of a science,” said Jarratt. “We’ll take risks if we think it can drive a target downstream impact or outcome.” Such a balanced view of risks and rewards helps optimize the media mix across funnel stages and seasons.

Sudden market shifts put a premium on agile planning and budgeting. As Ashley Laporte, director at communications firm RALLY, told us:

“It’s not about finding the perfect proportions to balance brand and demand but finding a flexible framework that understands how everything connects.”

Mastering the Metrics and Digging into the Data

Performance metrics and attribution models continue to proliferate and evolve. There has been a pronounced shift away from brand surveys toward more agile measurement approaches. The leaders we interviewed expressed uncertainty about which metrics and KPIs are the most accurate and how to enable insight-based decision making.

Even firms that can transcend traditional difficulties in measuring brand performance face challenges. As Jennifer Warren, VP of global brand marketing at Indeed, told us, “Business and finance leaders want to know how a 2% lift in consideration translates to sales and revenue.” Such visibility is difficult to achieve, as is determining ROI on long-term, multi-year brand investments. Marketers are now being asked to develop KPIs to measure the effectiveness of purpose-driven strategies around sustainability, for example, or diversity and inclusion efforts.

Despite the challenges, being data-driven enables marketers to speak the language of the business. As Portia Mount, VP of marketing, commercial HVAC Americas at Trane Technologies, put it, “When financial leaders say, ‘let’s cut all the brand stuff and just do demand,’ our job as marketers is explaining what the impact will be if we shut something down.” Better performance data and stronger customer insights make for more productive conversations in explaining that choosing between brand and demand is not a zero-sum game.

“I don’t think that there is a silver bullet for measurement,” said Tyrell Schmidt, U.S. chief marketing officer, TD Bank. “We are really careful not to oversell performance, which is easy to do because it always drives the fastest results.”

A Shared View Builds a Shared Stake

Demand-gen leaders also face challenges in tracking performance as major tech companies like Google and Apple work to shift away from the use of cookies. Consumer goods firms struggle to get point-of-sale performance data from partners (e.g., e-commerce platforms and big-box retailers) and look to fill the gap with third-party data (e.g., credit card records, basket analysis). The bottom line: as much data as marketing leaders have, they are always looking to attain the most relevant data.

The lack of alignment between brand and demand adds another layer of complexity. Today’s “incongruent” KPIs result from a lack of incentives to “play nice,” according to one CMO. Ideally, rich data and aligned KPIs are used within an agile budgeting and forecasting model that incorporates multiple time horizons (annually, quarterly, daily) and enables opportunistic, real-time adjustment.

Integrated performance dashboards accessible by both brand and demand teams have enabled some firms to generate holistic insights by combining both short-term (e.g., search data) and long-term (e.g., Net Promoter Scores) metrics. These efforts reflect the need for marketers to experiment and innovate in their approach to financial matters. At Prophet, we recently partnered with a health services client to develop an integrated performance dashboard across brand, demand and customer experience teams, enabling a cross-functional understanding of campaign performance.

Summarizing the Questions You Need to Ask

Looking ahead, brand and demand teams must commit to open communication and engagement to achieve a strong and harmonious relationship. When it comes to financial matters, flexibility is also key. In order to pave the way to a household of shared finances, you need to ask the right questions and the following are worth considering in setting the right investment priorities and measuring the effectiveness of collective efforts:

• How much impact does brand marketing have on conversion?
• What impact do customer acquisition efforts have on brand perception?
• What’s the appropriate level of investment across brand and demand without sacrificing overall performance?
• What do specific metrics tell us? Which metrics are most meaningful and why?
• Are we measuring campaign performance holistically and across the funnel?
• Do we have a shared view of brand and demand and how they connect to the business in the short and long term?
• Are key measurements used to inform annual planning cycles?

The new research report, “Brand and Demand: A Love Story” is here! Learn how today’s Brand and Demand Generation leaders are bringing their functions together to drive greater impact.
Download today!

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