Brands Are Pulling Content Creators Into Their AI Search Strategy

Working with content creators now comes with a new item on the brief: AI visibility. As more shoppers kick off their purchase journey inside AI chatbots, marketers are increasingly counting on content creators to get their brand name mentioned in those responses.

Brand visibility used to be built mainly through traditional SEO and paid advertising — in other words, brands talking about themselves. In the age of AI search, large language models (LLMs) answer user queries by scanning social media, blogs, news sites and other sources the brand doesn't directly control. That's forcing brands to lean more heavily on positive mentions from content creators.

"The machine gravitates toward the most open, most trustworthy information to get closer to an answer. That doesn't come from the brand itself," says Viral Nation CEO Joe Gagliese. Zoom launched a campaign this summer with creator-journalist Naiiema Raza, beginning to test the link between creator partnerships and AI visibility.

The measurement methodology hasn't caught up with the rest of the industry yet. According to four agency executives who spoke with Digiday, marketers are still largely trying to establish a direct link between creator work and AI visibility. But even correlation alone is enough to spark brand interest. "It comes up in almost every brief now," says Christina Collins, general manager at performance-based creator agency Trevant.

Clients are increasingly asking agencies to track how creator content shows up in AI search results, and are demanding a dedicated creator-AI-visibility strategy. Agencies like Trevant now start by auditing a brand's existing creator partnerships — to figure out which creators and which types of content are getting cited most often by AI language models.