AI as the fourth persona

It’s the most powerful currency a brand has—and the hardest to prove. For decades, we’ve said it’s built slowly: through consistency, through commitment, through experience. But for just as long, it’s been easy for even the savviest marketers to deprioritize or dismiss.

For years, you could imply trust. Advertisers could dress it up in a tagline. Communications professionals could signal it in a well-timed story. Content marketers consistent enough in tone could game the system. Consumers forgot or forgave, grew indifferent or were emotionally swayed.

But the reckoning is here—that game is over, because the system got smarter. Now someone, or something, sees it all, and sees through it. It audits. It parses and indexes. It cross-references. It’s evaluating everything—from your content to your category to your entire experience. It’s not just reading your copy—it’s ruthlessly reading the room. Every click. Every layout. Every delay—or delight—is a trust signal. Every comment, complaint, and contradiction.

That thing? You guessed it: AI.

AI doesn’t just process what you publish—it processes what others say about you. All of it is seen, assessed, and understood at scale, ingested and analyzed in its gestalt. And if your story doesn’t hold up, your brand is dismissed, and when a relevant query is posed, your brand doesn’t surface.

We’re entering a new reality where AI is rewriting the rules of visibility, and its implications touch every stage of the marketing funnel.

The brands that win in this AI-shaped web are the ones that show up consistently, with a clear, ownable voice and a trusted digital footprint. But just like the trust you have with friends... it’s built. And just like your friends, AI notices the hard work you do to build it.

Trust isn’t built in a moment. It’s built methodically, through acts of service, when your brand commits, and when your experience delivers.

These also happen to be the fundamentals of a brand strategy—defining your brand’s purpose, aligning on core commitments, codifying who you are, what you stand for and how you show up.

Think about how you build trust with someone new. You don’t trust them because of a flashy first impression. You trust them because they follow through, their story checks out, and they behave the same way when no one’s watching.

The same way people build trust is the new model for how brands earn it. Fortunately for those with strong brand strategies—and unfortunately for those without—it’s also how AI detects it.

Google’s new AI Overviews are increasingly showing up in search results—and when they do, even the most resilient organic links are seeing up to 30% fewer clicks. Ahrefs’ Louise Linehan analyzed over 300,000 keywords, and the results confirm that AIO keywords have 8x less traffic potential and 193x smaller search volume than traditional high-performing keywords.

You can still do the work to rank first through the classic principles of SEO. Those still apply and have their place. But if links to your website are buried under a giant AI-driven box that succinctly and adequately answers the query… does ranking even matter? AI has the horsepower to source content from beyond the top ten search results.

The implications to conventional content strategy wisdom are significant; it’s a seismic shift from prioritizing click-driving, flash-in-the-pan, written-for-SEO content and focusing efforts on territories you can authentically own and continuously keep building authority in, atomized and reconfigured for every major touchpoint on the Internet outside of (but still including) Google. In other words, it’s no longer about being first—it’s about being genuinely useful. Relevant, trustworthy content is more likely to be referenced in the zero-click results searchers rely on.

Grounding your content approach in a strong brand strategy is now mission critical. When AI rewards clarity, consistency, and authority, success necessitates that your content reflects a strong, unified brand point of view. When your brand shows up with a clear, defined purpose—across formats, channels, and queries—it becomes a signal AI learns to believe in.

That means every piece of content, every interaction, every layout choice is part of a bigger trust signal. It requires your brand show up cohesively, across your entire ecosystem.

Pro Tip:

Get ready for new KPIs—brand trust scores, credibility indexes, even AI visibility metrics.

Brand experience and customer experience have, until now, mostly been discrete disciplines within most enterprises, with the savviest marketing orgs ensuring the two would be connected. This was the “BX+CX” model, where they lived in parallel and occasionally in coordination. But in a world shaped by AI search, the impact of a relationship between the two is no longer just additive—it’s exponential.

Together, they determine how you’re found, understood, and trusted in an AI-shaped web.

AI takes your entire brand’s digital footprint into account (more on that below), including what your customers—both promoters and detractors—say about you online. Exceptional brand experiences that create customer advocacy, and thus positive online conversation, will be a core brand differentiator. This is not only relevant for discoverability. As we rapidly move toward agentic purchasing, where buying decisions are outsourced to AI “agents,” bottom-of-funnel purchase decisions will be directly impacted by upstream brand and CX strategies.

Betting your strategy on Google and your website alone is like building your house on sand. AI is collapsing the value of traditional top-of-funnel; in fact, in January 2025, it was reported that in the last three months of 2024, Google’s share of search fell below 90% for the first time in 10 years. That means brands are shifting energy into ecosystems they directly control—where they can build relationships, not just rankings.

Your website is now your brand’s sharpest weapon, and its purpose shifts from being a standalone online destination that capture clicks to the key platform to cement trust.

It’s the one place where you control the story, the experience, and the data. It’s your brand’s anchor node in a sprawling, distributed system. AI sees and considers the entire brand ecosystem, mapping how your entire brand shows up across the open web: on LinkedIn, in newsletters, in articles, in public data, and everywhere your voice carries weight. Owned and semi-owned channels are on the rise, including branded communities, events, editorial platforms, website enhancements, podcasts, newsletters, and first-party data activations.

AI connects these dots faster than any human ever could. Your website should be designed as a brand engine that clarifies and codifies your POV, showcases your brand’s authority, converting attention into belief. If your brand shows up fragmented, inconsistent, or impersonal, you’re hard to rank and even harder to trust.

But if your site connects the dots—linking to your thought leadership, mirroring your tone across channels, reinforcing your POV everywhere you show up—you go from being a content source to an ecosystem of trusted datapoints and stories corroborating your story. And that’s what AI loves and rewards.

Pro tip:

Structure your site for AI visibility—FAQ blocks, Q&A markup, clear topic hubs—but design it for human resonance. It also means not trapping your story inside your website. Distribute it. Let your POV flow across the open web. The more consistent signals you send out, the more credible—and discoverable—you become. And if someone makes it past the AI wall, they’re ready to believe you.

Your future go-to market strategy is no longer about being found—it’s about being trusted, cited, and unforgettable. Think of AI as a fourth persona whose trust you have to earn. It’s not just scanning for content, and you can’t game the process by targeting key messages at it hoping it’ll overlook everything else you’ve published. It’s traversing your site, mapping your ecosystem (including the sources that speak about you), and evaluating whether your message makes sense and checks out. It’s trying to understand you—just like a customer would—but in milliseconds, and at massive scale. If your experience, architecture, and story—and customers’ opinions—are disjointed, it notices. And if your tone is misaligned across channels, it hesitates.

Trust is no longer built through messaging alone. It’s built through methodically designed, structurally sound signals.

The winning brands will be the ones with strong identities, firmly held commitments, consistent messaging pillars and tone, and intuitive, delightfully designed experiences built for the emotionally and artificially intelligent.