Beyond the click: How brands can influence visibility in AI-generated answers

The way people discover information online is quietly but fundamentally changing.

Instead of scrolling through links and choosing which article to open, users are increasingly asking large language models to answer directly. Tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity don’t send people browsing; they synthesise information from multiple sources and deliver a ready-made response inside the interface.

For brands and publishers, this creates a new problem: what does visibility mean when nobody clicks anymore?

The decline of the click-based era

For years, search optimization revolved around a familiar feedback loop: publish content, earn rankings, drive clicks, measure performance. Traffic, impressions, and engagement acted as proxies for relevance and influence. AI-generated answers disrupt that loop entirely.

When a model generates an answer:

• users may never visit the original source
• insights can be reused without triggering a pageview
• standard analytics tools capture nothing

This isn’t a temporary fluctuation in search behaviour. It ...