If AI can’t see your brand, neither will your next customerThe digital marketing playbook is being rewritten. As consumers turn to AI engines for recommendations rather than searching and clicking, Adobe’s Duncan Egan explains why brands must shift strategies to survive.Duncan Egan AI is rewriting the rules of digital marketing.Gift this article3 min read8 hours agoYour next customer’s journey may begin and end before your brand’s website ever appears. Instead of searching, scanning and clicking through pages of results, consumers are increasingly asking AI engines for a recommendation and acting on the answer.For more than two decades, digital marketing has revolved around earning the click. Success was measured by rankings, impressions and traffic. The higher a brand appeared in search results, the greater its opportunity to convert customers.Today, the digital marketing success metric is being rewritten. No longer “the click”, whether it is OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot or Perplexity, the first interaction with a brand is increasingly mediated by AI rather than a traditional search engine. For marketers, this is more than another channel to optimise. It changes how brands are discovered, evaluated and recommended and turns AI visibility into a growth issue for boards, executive teams and marketing leaders alike.The numbers show the shift is already well under way. Adobe’s latest Digital Insights research found AI-driven traffic to retail websites increased 138 per cent year-on-year in May, while travel sites recorded 194 per cent growth and financial services saw growth of 105 per cent. More importantly, these visitors behave differently. They are more engaged, spend longer on websites and are significantly more likely to convert than visitors arriving through traditional channels.Duncan Egan is vice-president, enterprise marketing JAPAC at Adobe.In retail, visitors referred by AI now convert at rates 54 per cent higher than traditional traffic, generate 53 per cent more revenue per visit and are 36 per cent less likely to leave immediately. Twelve months ago, the reverse was true. AI traffic generated substantially less revenue than traditional search. That reversal tells us something extremely important. AI is no longer sending curious browsers. It is increasingly sending customers who have already completed much of their decision-making before they arrive. For brands, that means AI visibility has the potential to directly influence the bottom line, shaping not only traffic but conversion rates, customer acquisition costs and revenue growth.This week, Adobe announced Adobe Brand Visibility, a new solution designed to help businesses understand whether their brand is visible, trusted and chosen across AI surfaces. It goes beyond identifying visibility gaps to help teams act on them, connecting AI insights with content optimisation through a closed-loop system for delivering digital experiences to both people and AI agents. The solution combines Adobe’s AI optimisation capabilities with Semrush’s search intelligence, following the completion of Adobe’s acquisition this year.Adobe Brand Visibility draws on nearly 300 million real-world AI search prompts, alongside Semrush’s 17 years of SEO intelligence spanning 28.5 billion keywords and 43 trillion backlinks. For marketers, the objective is straightforward: move from wondering how AI sees their brand to knowing where they are winning, where competitors are being cited instead, and what content changes will improve commercial outcomes.  Historically, search optimisation was largely about ensuring a website ranked highly for the right keywords. Today, brands must also ensure they are understood, trusted and cited by AI systems that synthesise information from thousands of sources before presenting a recommendation. Generative Engine Optimisation is becoming an essential capability for organisations that want to remain visible in AI-powered discovery. It asks a more commercially urgent question: when customers ask AI what to buy, where to stay or who to trust, does your brand appear in the answer?AI visibility is shaped by signals traditional SEO was never designed to measure. Editorial content, buying guides, customer service pages, FAQs, product specifications and community discussions all contribute to how large language models understand brands. Adobe’s latest research found the organisations performing best in AI visibility consistently invest in structured, information-rich content rather than relying solely on product pages or marketing copy. Put simply, AI rewards brands that teach, not just sell. The organisations succeeding are those creating comprehensive, trustworthy information that helps customers make decisions before they ever reach a checkout. That same content gives AI systems the context they need to confidently recommend a business.For Australian organisations, this should be viewed as an opportunity, not a threat. Businesses that build strong AI visibility today are creating an advantage that compounds. As AI systems learn from authoritative, structured content, brands that consistently provide useful information become more likely to be recommended in future responses.The reverse is also true. Organisations that delay may find the gap becomes progressively harder to close as competitors strengthen their position with every customer interaction. For boards and executive teams, AI discoverability is no longer simply a marketing conversation. It increasingly influences customer acquisition, brand reputation and revenue growth. The question is shifting from whether AI will reshape customer journeys to whether your organisation is visible when those journeys begin. Digital competition will no longer be won solely by the brand that ranks first in search results. It will be won by the brands AI can see, understand and choose to recommend.Duncan Egan is vice-president enterprise marketing JAPAC at Adobe.Content is sponsored by Adobe.This content was produced in partnership with Adobe. 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