Many channel businesses are shifting to ranking in AI as part of their content strategy, but as Lewis Early, director of operations at GetCrisp explains, the traditional principles of digital marketing still apply.
When CNN filed legal action against AI firm Perplexity, coverage focused on the copyright implications with Perplexity allegedly unlawfully distributing CNN’s copyrighted content without permission in their LLM’s responses.
The case highlights how AI visibility is not just an SEO issue, but a licensing one too. If the courts rule that uncompensated web scraping is illegal, visibility in AI search could become dominated by brands with the ability to strike content partnerships and licensing deals.
AI doesn’t create content, it needs sources. When access to these sources is potentially changing from one day to the next, it raises potential issues.
For those working in digital marketing, this case raises issues that aren’t about this specific case, but on how AI is planned around as part of a content strategy. A lot of channel businesses are shifting focus towards ‘ranking in AI’ as the next evolution of SEO. But this can’t be done in isolation and needs to be part of a wider strategy.
Chasing AI visibility is the wrong race
When Google introduced AI overviews, brands rushed to try and secure ‘position zero’ in the rankings. Now the priority is ranking in LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity. This instinct isn’t the problem; it’s the assumption that AI visibility is a separate goal.
So, you want your brand to show up in AI search, where do you start? AI draws on existing content from websites, published articles, third-party commentary and reviews. What appears in AI summaries entirely depends on how strong this content is.
That means to start ranking in AI results, you need to have a content strategy that puts the information you want out there first and foremost. If that sounds like what you need for an effective SEO strategy, you’d be correct. It’s all about producing high quality content. And if a legal case changes how AI is allowed to source content, then your hard work won’t have gone to waste.
AI visibility is not a standalone goal
Pressure on brands to rank in searches is nothing new. With AI-generated answers now thrown into the mix, it’s understandable some brands feel they must focus on achieving this marker.
Short-term tactics we’re seeing include publishing high volumes of thin, keyword-heavy content designed to match AI queries, creating generic ‘expert commentary’ pages with no authorship or depth, chasing backlinks in publications regardless of editorial credibility or relevance and optimising content structure for machines at the expense of clarity for human readers.
These aren’t new mistakes; they’re like SEO shortcuts we used to see. But AI systems don’t just index content, they interpret and summarise it. Weak or repetitive material dilutes how a brand is represented, so the right brand strategy becomes even more important.
Consistency matters more than ever
Brands that perform consistently well in AI-generated results tend have clear, coherent and repeated positioning across every channel.
AI systems interpret a brand from multiple sources, so if messaging varies too much, the system merges conflicting signals, resulting in diluted or inaccurate representation.
Brands with a good content strategy, clear SEO, consistent messaging and PR coverage will be more accurately represented in AI systems and more resilient in the event of change.
What good AI visibility looks like
Strong AI visibility in practice looks like strong marketing done properly. It means positioning a brand in a way that is specific enough to be understood and consistent enough to be repeated.
Google recently published its own AI visibility checker within Search Console, and its advice is to focus on the same strategies they recommend for SEO. Keep publishing consistently insightful content, prioritising readability and structuring web content to effectively guide users where they want to go. If your ideal customer finds it useful, there’s a good chance an AI will see it as useful too.
If brands asking, ‘how do we rank in AI?’ it’s often the wrong question. What they should ask is ‘is our brand clearly understood, consistently communicated and credible enough to surface accurately?’
If the answer is yes, then AI visibility will be a lot less hard work. If the answer is no, then no amount of AI-specific optimisation will fix it. As more people switch to using AI search – Google say that 68% of searches now end without a site being clicked on – if you don’t adapt, you run the risk of being left behind.
The CNN/Perplexity case is one indication among many that AI search is still finding its footing. But the core principles on getting found online still apply. Those have always been the foundations of good marketing and remain so.
This article first appeared in News in the Channel magazine issue #41.
