The Future of Discovery Depends on Winning AI Share of Voice

For more than two decades, digital marketing has revolved around a single, relentless goal — the one every marketer and SEO professional has chased: ranking number one on Google. 

Companies have poured millions into building teams dedicated to this mission. Writers churn out SEO-optimized content, analysts track keywords obsessively, and entire strategies hinge on nudging a page just one position higher. Because for years, moving up even a single spot meant more visibility, more clicks, and thousands of new eyes on your brand.

But here’s the truth marketers don’t want to hear: that world is disappearing.

A new era of discovery has taken its place, one that doesn’t use pages, doesn’t rely on rankings, and doesn’t reward the traditional SEO playbook. 

Instead of scrolling through lists of links, people are now turning to AI assistants for answers, insights, and product recommendations. And rather than delivering 10 blue links to sift through, these assistants offer a single, confident answer that increasingly shapes what customers choose next.

The future of discovery belongs to AI assistants. And the new competitive advantage is AI Share of Voice — how often your brand is recommended inside those AI-generated answers.

The shift isn’t coming. It’s already happening, and the data shows it’s accelerating faster than anyone expected.

The shift from rankings to Answer Share

Since ChatGPT was released in late 2022, the way people search has fundamentally changed. What started as a gradual shift has quickly accelerated as AI assistants became more capable and mainstream. Instead of digging through links themselves, people now rely on these models to deliver direct, clear answers and recommendations.

ChatGPT is widely recognized as one of the most quickly adopted digital consumer apps in history. According to Bain & Company, prompt volume in ChatGPT grew nearly 70% between January and June 2025, with shopping-related prompts alone rising 25%. And these aren’t casual queries. They reflect shopping, product research, and buying decisions that once took place on Google.

In other words, the moments where customers signal purchase intent have moved from search engines to LLMs.

Bain’s research also shows that 80% of consumers now rely on AI answers for at least 40% of their searches. AI has quickly become the default place people ask the questions that used to start on Google.

During the same period, organic web traffic fell by 15–25%. AI is absorbing the discovery phase that SEO used to own.

This shift has also changed the mechanics of how visibility works. In AI-driven discovery:

• There is no “page one.”
  
  

• There are no blue links competing for clicks.
  
  

• Users don’t compare webpages in  results — they receive one concise answer.

In this new world of AI chat, visibility comes not from ranking but from being mentioned in the answer.

So when a user asks, “What are the best running shoes for flat feet?” or “Which CRM integrates with Slack and HubSpot?”, the AI assistant generates a single, coherent recommendation.

If your brand appears inside the answer, you are visible. If you don’t, you are invisible. This is the new reality of digital discovery.

What Share of Voice means in the AI era

In the world of LLMs, Share of Voice (SoV) has taken on an entirely new meaning.

Traditional SOV measured the percentage of advertising or search presence a brand held.

In today’s AI-driven search environment, Share of Voice has shifted from measuring clicks and impressions to reflect how often your brand shows up inside AI-generated answers. This includes how frequently it’s mentioned, referenced, or recommended compared to competitors when people ask questions that matter to your category.

AI Share of Voice = Answer Share

Put simply, AI Share of Voice is about how much of the conversation your brand owns when consumers ask questions that matter to your category. In an environment where AI assistants provide a single, streamlined answer instead of a list of options, showing up in that answer becomes the new form of discoverability.

Why it matters:

• It shows how much of AI’s answer is about your brand. If the model consistently includes your brand, you’re part of the customer’s decision-making moment. If not, you’re left out entirely.
  
  

• It signals who is leading a category in AI-first experiences.
  Brands that appear more frequently become the “default choices” AI leans on.
  
  

• It connects directly to purchase intent. People trust AI recommendations because they feel personalized, which means being included in those answers has real influence on buying behavior.
  
  

• It builds momentum over time. The more often AI assistants mention your brand, the more likely they are to keep recommending it — visibility compounds.

AI’s behavior is fundamentally different from a search engine

AI assistants don’t simply retrieve links, they interpret, synthesize, and contextualize information in ways traditional search engines never have:

• They synthesize information from multiple sources to understand the full scope of a question.
  
  

• They condense options into a smaller, curated set of recommendations, often a single best-fit answer.
  
  

• They remove the old choice architecture and surface only what seems most trustworthy or relevant.
  
  

• They personalize the output based on the user’s intent, wording, context, and past behavior. 

When only one answer exists, either you’re in it or your competitor is.

The winners and losers are already emerging

Industries are already seeing dramatic differences between which brands appear in AI responses and which do not, demonstrating that AI visibility is often uncorrelated with SEO visibility.

A simple example makes this clear. When we tested the prompt “What are the best places to book last-minute travel deals?” ChatGPT surfaced brands like HotelTonight, Hopper, Skyscanner, Google Flights, Lastminute.com, GTFO, JetRadar, and other curated deal newsletters.

Notice what’s missing: despite dominating Google search results for decades, Expedia didn’t appear anywhere in the response.

… even though it shows up in Google search results in position 2:

This just goes to show that companies winning in SEO rankings don’t necessarily win in AI-generated answers. In this case, Expedia was outperformed not only by competitors of similar size, but also by smaller, more niche players like GTFO and JetRadar.

As AI searches grow, and they are growing fast, these patterns will start to compound, locking out brands that fail to adapt their strategy.

AI Share of Voice directly impacts your bottom line 

And the financial impact of this shift isn’t small… it’s already reshaping how brands drive growth.

SEMrush reports that 71.5% of U.S. consumers now use AI tools for at least some searches, and AI-driven visitors convert 4.4x better than traditional organic search visitors. That’s huge.

What that really means:

• Appearing in AI answers drives higher-intent discovery.
  
  

• Absence from AI answers removes you entirely from the consideration set.
  
  

• Competitors who dominate AI Share of Voice convert at significantly higher rates.

To put this into perspective: in a world where AI platforms now answer nearly 40% of people’s questions, every percentage point of Share of Voice directly shapes a brand’s acquisition, trust, engagement, loyalty, and ultimately its revenue. While ranking was once the primary growth driver, today, AI recommendations have taken its place.

The brands that appear most frequently in AI answers will win disproportionate market share over the next decade.

How Yolando helps brands win AI Share of Voice

The real challenge? Marketing teams don’t have the tools to compete in a landscape where there are no rankings to optimize for, no keywords to target, and no playbook to follow. But the stakes for visibility have never been higher.

Yolando fills that gap by turning AI visibility from an exhausting, manual guessing game into a clear, structured, and actionable system.

It was built to solve the visibility challenges that most organizations are running straight into. Today, if a team wants to understand where they show up in AI, they’re stuck running prompts by hand, comparing answers across platforms, and guessing why competitors appear more often. Yolando removes that guesswork. It continuously runs the prompts you care about across every major AI platform and tracks exactly how you’re being represented.

With every response analyzed, you see your real visibility footprint: how often you’re mentioned, how you’re framed, and whether the models surface you early in the answer or skip you entirely. It’s the clearest signal of whether you’re part of the AI-driven discovery journey or silently missing from it.

Yolando closes the gap, turning AI signals into strategy

But Yolando explains the “why” behind it, and what actions you should take to improve your standing. If your visibility is inconsistent, Yolando shows whether that fluctuation comes from a specific platform, a topic area, or a stage of the funnel. If the model’s tone shifts negative, you can see whether the issue is outdated product information, unclear messaging, or stronger competitor content shaping the model’s understanding.

Most importantly, Yolando helps you act on what it finds. Powered by your unique brand voice, content style, and discoverability insights, Yolando generates AI-ready content designed for intelligence systems, not search engines. It lets your brand speak in a format AI platforms understand, cite, and trust, which meaningfully increases your chances of showing up in real customer answers.

More than a visibility tool, Yolando becomes the engine that shows where you stand, why you’re being outperformed, and what actions will move you forward.

The future of digital discovery isn’t about fighting for page-one rankings.
It’s about shaping the answers that AI Platforms deliver when customers ask the questions that matter most.

Don’t wait for AI platforms to decide your visibility for you. See where your brand shows up, and stay ahead. Book a demo of Yolando to get started.

FAQ

What is AI Share of Voice, and why does it matter now? 

AI Share of Voice measures how often your brand appears inside AI-generated answers. As AI assistants replace traditional search behavior, showing up in these answers determines whether customers discover you, or never see you at all.

How is AI search different from traditional SEO?

SEO fought for rankings and click-throughs. AI removes both. Instead of pages of links, users get one synthesized answer. If your brand doesn’t show up in that single output, you effectively don’t exist in that discovery moment.

Why are established SEO leaders losing ground in AI answers?

AI doesn’t reward historical rankings or domain authority the way Google does. It synthesizes information and surfaces what it views as most relevant or trustworthy, which is why brands like Expedia are being overtaken by smaller players like GTFO and JetRadar in AI responses.

How does appearing in AI answers impact revenue?

AI-driven visitors convert 4.4× better than organic search visitors. Being included in AI recommendations directly influences high-intent decision moments, shaping customer acquisition and long-term market share.

How can brands improve their visibility in AI answers?

Brands need AI-ready content, clear messaging, and consistent representation across conversational platforms, not keyword-stuffed SEO articles. Tools like Yolando help teams measure their current Share of Voice and generate content that aligns with how AI models evaluate and recommend brands.

What happens if my brand doesn’t adapt to AI-driven discovery?

As AI usage accelerates and traditional organic traffic declines 15–25%, brands that don’t optimize for AI will gradually disappear from customer consideration. The longer they wait, the harder it becomes to break into answers that have already established their “default” recommendations.