Navigating Towards Multi-AI Search: A CMO’s Guide To Visibility
A CMO’s guide to winning visibility across multi-AI search platforms and adapting to the future of discovery.
Navigating Towards Multi-AI Search: A CMO’s Guide To Visibility
Ecosystem Evolution
Right now, the search landscape is undergoing a fundamental transformation that will accelerate significantly over time. While Google still dominates with about 90% market share, AI-powered search platforms are experiencing explosive growth that is impossible to ignore.
For instance, ChatGPT is showing 21% month over month growth and is on track to hit 700 million weekly active users. Furthermore, Claude and Perplexity are posting similar numbers at 21% and 19% growth, respectively. Grok has seen over 1,000% month-over-month growth. Source BrightEdge Generative Parser and DataCube analysis, July 2025.
Is ChatGPT A Threat Or An Opportunity?
ChatGPT is primarily a tool for SEO, enhancing content creation and keyword research while streamlining strategies; however, it poses a potential threat through content saturation and decreased engagement if not used thoughtfully.
ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is an advanced language model that uses artificial intelligence for understanding and generating human-like text. It can answer questions, create content, and engage in conversations. With its ability to produce coherent and contextually relevant text, ChatGPT has garnered attention from marketers and SEO professionals alike.
LLM Optimization Strategy
Where SEO once determined rankings, large language models (LLMs) are now shaping which brands appear in conversations and product suggestions. Models, like Perplexity.ai, are making the buyer journey completely seamless from discovery to purchase. This isn’t a technical adjustment but a strategic reset.
To stay relevant, marketers must learn to influence the systems consumers increasingly rely on. LLM optimization, a new approach impact search results, is quickly becoming marketing’s next imperative.
CMO Priorities
The CMO AI and SEO mindset shift
Marketers need to consider optimizing for multiple AI engines, each with its own distinct data ingestion pipelines. For ChatGPT and Clause, you need clear, structured, cited content that AI models can safely reuse. While for Perplexity, timeliness, credibility, and brevity matter more than traditional keyword density.
It is all about optimizing for influencing and citations and making sure you appear in the proper context at the right moment within all these distinct types of AI experiences.
The Search Bot To AI User Agent Revolution
With AI increasingly bridging the gap between human-computer interactions. OpenAI, with its continuous innovations, has introduced ChatGPT-User, a user agent employed by plugins in ChatGPT to facilitate on-demand web browsing on behalf of users. For instance, looking for comparing “Apple Watch vs. Fotbot” from current reviews. In that case, the ChatGPT user agent is acting as your browsing assistant and operating on your behalf, which is fundamentally different from traditional search engines and crawlers.
Traditional Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Evolution
Artificial intelligence isn’t replacing traditional SERPs, but rather utilizing and aligning with them. As per internal data, 92% searches happen and coming to meaningful actions like downloads, sign-ups, or purchases, 95% start on Google. Search volume not gone down but actually grown 10% year-over-year. With AI mode, Google is layering AI directly into the experience.
While dealing with complex queries or personal searches, those traditional SERPs provide some things AI cannot, and those are depth, discernment, and diverse perspectives, and e-commerce is a perfect example when shopping. Further, Google’s Gemini model powers AI Overviews that appear above traditional listings, creating comprehensive summaries from multiple sources.
Google AI mode Strategy might change an enterprise approach
A major shift in content due to AI engaging with websites and surfacing information in real-time conversations. AI agents browsing on behalf of users, and unlike classic crawlers, it’s not about indexing pages to be served up later, not a real time interactions. AI mode and AI overview are not distinct strategies but are the same strategy operating at different thresholds. AI mode acts as the broad discovery engine, and is 2.1x more likely to include brands (compared to AI overviews), surfacing more unique brands overall, and maintains pretty stable week-over-week patterns. Further, an AI query is never just one search anymore; AI mode runs dozens of queries on behalf of the user before showing an answer.
Agentic AI Agents Transforming The Search Funnel
There is a major shift in how content gets discovered and delivered, as new types of AI agents engage with websites and surface information in real-time conversations. It’s real-time interactions. AI digital assistants are researching, comparing, and recommending, and if your page is slow or the content is not clear, they move on instantly. The AI agent preprocessing layer influences every subsequent customer interaction. Unlike traditional crawlers that simply index content, these systems navigate websites, submitting forms, comparing options, and making recommendations on behalf of the user in real-time.
Evolution of awareness phase from user-driven discovery to pre-aware algorithmic surfacing, where AU agents proactively recommend options based on context, preferences, and behavioural patterns, often before the user consciously realises, modern buyer behaviour no longer follows a straight line progression.
