AI search has shifted the game from chasing keywords to shaping narratives. If you do not actively design how engines talk about you, decades of legacy content and third-party noise will do it for you.
- Audit how AI engines currently describe your brand, products, and competitors, not just where you rank.
- Define 3–5 core narrative drivers you want LLMs to repeat about your company, then hard‑wire them into your site and content.
- Convert legacy docs, PDFs, and JavaScript-heavy experiences into clean HTML so engines can actually read your best material.
- Use FAQs, headings, and short clarifying sections to correct outdated perceptions and guide AI toward your preferred story.
- Tear down silos: align SEO, product marketing, web, campaigns, and PR around one shared topical authority map.
- Monitor AI visibility with specialized tools, then iterate weekly—this is not a one‑and‑done project.
- Adopt a “search everywhere optimization” mindset so your presence is coherent across your site, docs, PR, social, and media.
The Search Everywhere Narrative Loop (SENL)
Discover How AI Currently Talks About You
Before you optimize anything, you need a baseline narrative audit. Prompt Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others with brand, product, and category questions to see how they describe you, what they omit, and where they are flat‑out wrong. Complement this with tools like SEMrush’s AI SEO toolkit to quantify where and how you appear in AI search results.
Define Your Non‑Negotiable Narrative Drivers
From that baseline, choose the 3–5 core narratives you must own: core product positioning, deployment model (for example, cloud vs. on‑prem), category role, and key differentiators. These become your “source of truth” statements that should appear—consistently and in plain language—across your website, docs, PR, and leadership content.
Re‑engineer Your Owned Properties for AI Readability
LLMs read HTML, not your clever JavaScript widgets or buried PDFs. Systematically convert critical assets into crawlable HTML, tighten heading hierarchies, add concise intros that state the point up front, and build FAQs that clarify confusing or legacy topics. This is where you turn thirty years of technical debt into clean fuel for AI engines.
Step 4: Extend the Story Across High‑Authority Surfaces
Once your site and docs tell the right story, expand those same drivers into PR, guest articles, conference talks, YouTube, podcasts, and social. Prioritize high‑authority outlets and formats that are frequently scraped and summarized by AI systems. The aim is narrative density: the same core truths appearing across multiple credible sources.
Step 5: Align Cross‑Functional Teams Around Topical Authority
SEO can no longer live as “the janitor in the closet.” Bring product marketing, web, campaigns, sales, and documentation into a single topical authority plan: what themes you must own, what content is missing, and how each team contributes. This is how you move from a collection of pages to a cohesive, machine-readable expertise graph.
Step 6: Monitor, Learn, and Rewrite the Story in Cycles
AI search is not static. Set a cadence—monthly at minimum—to re‑run prompts, review AI overview performance, and watch for shifts in how engines describe you. When you see misalignment (for example, engines over‑emphasizing legacy products), respond with targeted content updates, doc rewrites, and new narrative assets until the story changes.
From Old‑School SEO to AI Search Everywhere Optimization
Dimension | Traditional SEO Focus | AI Search / GEO / AEO Focus | Leadership Implication |
|---|---|---|---|
Primary Goal | Rank individual pages for specific keywords in SERPs. | Shape how AI systems summarize your brand, products, and category across many surfaces. | Leaders must care less about single rankings and more about the composite story engines tell. |
Optimization Surface | Website pages, meta tags, backlinks, and technical performance. | Complete digital footprint: site, documentation, PR, social, video, podcasts, and third‑party coverage. | Budgets and teams need to align around “search everywhere,” not just “the website.” |
Core Success Metric | Organic traffic, keyword rankings, and click‑through rates. | Visibility and sentiment in AI overviews, narrative accuracy, and zero‑click influence. | Reporting must include narrative health and AI visibility alongside classic SEO KPIs. |
Leadership Questions That Force Better AI Search Strategy
What story would an LLM tell about your company if your website disappeared tomorrow?
Answer: If your perception is overly defined by legacy docs, third‑party reviews, or outdated thought leadership, AI engines will lean on that material even if it no longer reflects your focus. Leaders should regularly prompt AI tools with “Who is [Brand]?” and “What does [Brand] do?”, then compare the responses against their current strategy deck. The gap between the two is your AI narrative debt.
Where are legacy products or messages still overpowering your current positioning?
Answer: Daniel’s work at Informatica revealed that an older on‑premises product was being mentioned four times more often than the current cloud solution in AI responses. That kind of imbalance is common in established organizations. Leaders should commission a structured content and docs audit to detect where yesterday’s offerings overshadow today’s priorities, then resource a remediation plan, not just a “cleanup project.”
Are your sales conversations feeding your search and content strategy?
Answer: The language your customers use with sales often differs from what shows up in keyword tools. Pull call transcripts, chat logs, and objection patterns, then feed those phrases into generative engines to see what appears. This creates a direct loop from real customer language to AI search optimization, keeping your content aligned with how people actually search and ask questions.
Who owns “search everywhere” inside your organization?
Answer: If SEO is buried in a corner and measured only on traffic, you will miss the strategic opportunity AI search presents. Someone senior needs explicit responsibility for orchestrating topical authority across web, product marketing, content, PR, and documentation. That role should have both the mandate and the air cover to change legacy content that no longer serves the narrative.
How will you measure progress beyond classic SEO KPIs?
Answer: You still need rankings and organic traffic, but they are no longer the whole story. Add metrics such as the number of AI overview impressions, share of voice for target narratives, the ratio of legacy to current product mentions, and the accuracy of key positioning statements in AI answers. When these metrics show movement, you know your narrative work is influencing the engines that increasingly answer for you.
Author: Emanuel Rose, Senior Marketing Executive, Strategic eMarketing
Contact: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emanuelrose
Last updated:
- Daniel Horowitz, “AI Search and Topical Authority” – conversation on Marketing in the Age of AI podcast.
- SEMrush AI SEO Toolkit – used to analyze AI overview visibility and narrative drivers.
- Informatica public materials on IDMC and cloud data management positioning.
- Industry discussions on topical authority, hub‑and‑spoke content models, and zero‑click search behavior.
About Strategic eMarketing: Strategic eMarketing helps growth‑minded organizations design and execute authentic, data‑driven marketing systems that convert attention into revenue.
https://strategicemarketing.com/about
https://www.linkedin.com/company/strategic-emarketing
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/marketing-in-the-age-of-ai
https://open.spotify.com/show/marketing-in-the-age-of-ai
https://www.youtube.com/@EmanuelRose
Guest Spotlight
Guest: Daniel Horowitz, SEO Strategist and Storyteller
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/danielhorowitzseo/
Company: Informatica (enterprise data management and cloud solutions)
Bio: Daniel is an SEO strategist with a proven track record of driving sustainable, scalable growth across enterprise, SaaS, and startup environments. At Informatica, he leads a cross-functional SEO strategy focused on topical authority, internal linking, and AI search visibility. A recent pilot he developed drove over 500,000 impressions in Google AI Overviews, aligning SEO with product and content stakeholders across the organization. Previously, he ran offsite SEO operations at SimpleTiger, where he built and scaled a system that generated $50K–$75K per month in agency revenue, managing a global contractor team, implementing early AI-assisted workflows, and delivering results for clients like Shopify, E*TRADE, Jotform, and Segment. As a consultant, he has partnered with brands including KEEN Footwear, Synopsys, Black Duck, and Vendavo to build content frameworks, run technical audits, and drive zero-click optimization strategies. Outside of SEO, Daniel is a published writer and comics creator whose editorial work has appeared in USA Today, VentureBeat, HP Tech Takes, and Digital Trends, and he has written original comics such as Lord of the Twin Lands and American Eagle #1. He brings a storytelling mindset to everything he does, whether building scalable SEO systems or scripting a 22-page fight scene.
Podcast episode: Marketing in the Age of AI — Conversation with Daniel Horowitz on AI search, topical authority, and narrative drivers (recorded for release around Wednesday, November 26th, 2025, 3:00 PM PST / 6:00 PM EST).
About the Host
Emanuel Rose is a senior marketing executive and author of “Authentic Marketing in the Age of AI,” helping organizations blend human storytelling with intelligent automation to grow revenue and deepen customer relationships. Connect with Emanuel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emanuelrose.
Put Your AI Narrative to Work This Quarter
Start by running a simple experiment: ask three AI engines to explain who you are and what you do, then compare those answers to your current strategy. From there, choose one high‑impact narrative gap—like a legacy product overshadowing your current offer—and commit to fixing it across your site, docs, and PR over the next 90 days. When you treat AI search as a narrative design problem, you stop reacting to algorithms and start leading the conversation about your brand.