At space150 we put brands at the forefront of culture and technology to find new + innovative ways to grow demand through content, experiences, product, and promotion. For the first 25 years we built amazing brand experiences centered around informing, engaging and converting audiences. Some of these experiences were websites, some were apps, some were something else entirely. But all of them shared a strategy - craft and promote brands’ stories online to impact business results. To date, the biggest opportunity to augment a brand-controlled narrative was people, primarily using online forums like social posts, reviews, and blogs to share their POVs on brands and products. Now that opportunity grows with the growth of AI. While the habit of searching for answers online isn’t changing, how and where people are finding them is. Search behavior moves to LLMs - users are increasingly looking to LLM platforms like ChatGPT for answers. Many times they get their answer in-platform, and sometimes LLM results are driving traffic to shopping, news, and academic sites. More here. More AI results in traditional search engines, like Google - AI results are nearly ubiquitous, resulting in more zero click searches, and ultimately less traffic to websites. This will continue to accelerate. As of today, Google has rolled out AI Mode to all users. While this important evolution is an opportunity to provide better efficiency and engagement for users, there are a number of risks to marketers if they don’t get ahead of this evolution, most importantly:

• Less organic traffic to sites, most impactful for brands that rely on websites to play a major role in business such as lead gen/ CRM acquisition or eCommerce sales.
• Less control over the brand, including increased risk for potential misinformation.

As this is changing rapidly, we are encouraging our clients to get ahead of this by understanding this impact is having on almost every workstream in digital marketing. As this is a large, complex, and quickly-evolving topic, this post will set the stage, and we will be creating a series of updates to go deeper into all of these realms. Evolve and expand the role of organic search and social -

• SEO - used to be about optimizing websites and apps for the biggest search engine, now it’s about optimizing content for a wider variety of AI-empowered sources and allowing it to be indexed
• Organic Social - expand engagement/organic social monitoring to include additional focus on how social mentions are showing up in AI, including Reddit, YouTube, and Linkedin

Invest in more brand content, prioritizing depth and variety - While marketers have long-prioritized messaging that is simple yet effective, there is now a need to round out that curated messaging with content that can answer in-depth, multilayered questions focusing on a variety of formats such as Question and Answer, Brand Storytelling, and Unique Queries Continually re-evaluate paid media channel performance, the role of media, and new opportunities

• Paid Search - While paid search is poised to be the biggest loser of revenues from search engines that are optimizing to 0 click experiences, these same search engines have been long training advertisers to expand beyond the legacy paid search investments to platforms that prioritize machine learning and performance - if you haven’t already, start strategically testing into more Google ad products including Performance Max and Demand Gen
• Diversify your channel mix, especially if you are heavily reliant on paid search
• Monitor new opportunities with Monetized LLMs - ChatGPT has potentially changed its tune about opportunities for ad supported tiers.

Create an AI governance task force to monitor and respond to LLM summaries

• Reasses/augment tools - legacy SEO or Paid Social data subscriptions likely won’t provide a comprehensive look at AI channels impact on your brands - assess your current reporting stack and augment where needed
• Create a protocol for reporting misinformation or inconsistencies in brand usage
• Example - Google’s AI results surfaced outdated product information for our client Eversense, we have provided feedback.

Invest in new GenerativeAI driven opportunities

• Keep your brand visible in AI results by adopting emerging open standards like Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP). Think of MCP as a USB-C port for data: any compliant AI agent can plug in and pull trusted facts—no scraping required. Conduct a quick technical audit of your APIs, databases, or CMS exports and expose the most valuable ones through an MCP server (open-source kits are available). This lets future chat-bots and answer engines quote your authoritative data, boosting both reach and accuracy as conversational search keeps growing. Many sites already expose JSON or GraphQL; an MCP wrapper can be as small as a weekend project using open libraries. Here is a quick example: A recipe site could stand up a lightweight MCP server that exposes endpoints like searchByIngredient and getRecipeByName; then AI cooking assistants can pull your spinach-and-goat-cheese quiche data directly and credit your brand whenever they answer users’ meal-planning questions.
  
  Because generative-AI “answer engines” (Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Gemini, etc.) are already replacing classic SEO results, delivering structured, authoritative data via MCP is a forward-looking way to earn citations and keep brand accuracy intact. https://modelcontextprotocol.io/faqs
  Be prepared for where people search / look / explore to change. Open AI just hired Fidji Simo (CEO of Instacart) as “CEO of Applications”. She built up advertising for Facebook, before instagram.

Stay tuned to space150 or reach out if you want to discuss this in more detail!