AI Search Is Changing Everything You Know About Branding

Michael Buckbee with Nicholas Kuhne

AI isn’t just changing how we create content — it’s quietly transforming how brands are discovered, evaluated, and trusted. The old rules of SEO and digital presence are being rewritten in real time, and most businesses don’t even realise it’s happening.

Michael Buckbee has been ahead of these shifts. A developer, marketer, and co-founder of Knowatoa, he’s spent the past year obsessing over how brands show up in AI-powered search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini. What he’s found is both fascinating and a little alarming.

When you search for a company in Google, the results are often clean, navigational, and predictable. Type in “Wells Fargo” and you’re directed to log in, find a branch, or check your balance. Ask the same question to ChatGPT, and it will remind you that the bank was fined billions for unethical practices. That’s not a bug — it’s a fundamental shift in how AI surfaces information.

“Brand sentiment matters in a way it never has before,” Buckbee explains. “AI tools aren’t just ranking sites, they’re synthesising meaning. If your brand’s digital footprint is negative or inconsistent, AI will reflect that — and you may never know what it’s saying.”

The New Brand Equation: Sentiment + Statements + Knowledge

Buckbee has identified a three-part framework for understanding how AI models interpret brand information:

Brand Sentiment: What’s the general emotional tone surrounding your brand online?
Brand Statements: What are the explicit facts and claims associated with your brand?
Brand Knowledge: How well do the AI models understand who you are and what you do?

Put those three together, and you’ve got a much clearer picture of how your brand will rank in generative AI search. The kicker? Most companies haven’t optimised any of these. They’re relying on outdated SEO strategies while AI tools are crafting narrative summaries that users trust even more than top search results.

Visibility Without Attribution

Traditional content marketing worked on the premise that you publish helpful, longform content, attract backlinks, and rank for relevant keywords. But AI tools don’t care about backlinks. They care about consistency, clarity, and — crucially — repetition.

“If the AI model sees the same statement about your business over and over again, it starts to trust that statement,”

says Buckbee. “That’s how you avoid hallucinations and ensure your brand isn’t misrepresented.”

But here’s the rub: AI models often absorb your content without attribution. They might summarise your services, recommend your product, or answer a question using your blog post — all without sending traffic back to you. That’s the new game. You’re not fighting for clicks anymore; you’re fighting for presence inside the machine’s brain.

A Startup Born From a Spreadsheet

Knowatoa wasn’t originally intended to be a business. Buckbee built a script for himself and a few friends to see what ChatGPT was saying about their companies. Then something odd happened: their customers started reporting that they found them via ChatGPT.

“It became clear that people were using these tools to evaluate businesses,” Buckbee says. “Not just casually — they were making purchasing decisions based on what the AI told them.”

So he turned the script into a spreadsheet, then into a dashboard, and finally into a full SaaS platform. Knowatoa now tracks how brands are represented in AI search and helps them correct false or outdated information — a kind of brand observability layer for the AI era.

Rewriting the Customer Journey

If AI tools are doing the summarising for you, the traditional buyer journey — awareness, interest, consideration, decision — is getting collapsed. People are skipping steps, or having them completed by a model. That means your brand needs to be ready for a single-shot impression: one answer, one output, one shot at winning the customer.

“You used to build the funnel,” says Buckbee. “Now the AI builds it for you.”

This shift demands a new layer on top of the customer journey: the AI layer. What does ChatGPT say when someone asks about your pricing, certifications, or geographic reach? What does Perplexity think about your ethics? Can Gemini even find you?

For marketers and brand strategists, this is the next frontier. It’s not enough to be online. You need to be understood by the machines that mediate every modern customer interaction.

The Future Is Multimodal (and Weird)

As AI tools evolve, so do the ways we interact with them. Buckbee points to voice search, AR glasses, and visual interfaces as the next big leap. Google Lens already lets users search by snapping a photo. Meta has smart glasses that can whisper answers into your ear. The input is becoming more intuitive — and the output less visible.

“Text is still king,” Buckbee notes. “But soon, we won’t even be typing. We’ll speak, gesture, or snap a photo, and the AI will deliver answers. The challenge is: how does your brand show up in that moment?”

The shift isn’t just technological — it’s existential. We’re moving from a world where brands compete on SERPs to one where they compete inside opaque models. It’s a black box — but Knowatoa is prying it open.

What Next?

Curious how your brand appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini?

Try Knowatoa.com — no credit card required. Just insight.

Want to chat with Michael?Drop him an email at mike@knowatoa.com