Building brand authority in the Gemini era of Search

“In this new LLM world, how do we actually get discovered and stand out?”

It is the question on every marketing leader’s mind and one I hear a lot. At first glance, it feels like the path to purchase was completely scrambled overnight. A persistent myth suggests that new, intelligent Search experiences act as restrictive gatekeepers — narrowing choices, curating fewer responses, and shutting brands out of the conversation.

The reality is the new era of Search doesn’t shrink the consumer journey; it expands it.

People using AI search visit 12 touchpoints across their buying process, nearly 3X more than in non-AI journeys.¹ They are exploring broader consideration sets, creating an unprecedented opportunity for brands to break through and be discovered. Crucially, this complexity doesn’t overwhelm shoppers. On Google, 3 in 4 people report that AI features help them make faster, more confident decisions.²

To connect with today’s consumers, the CMOs I speak with everyday have three fundamental priorities:

• Follow the super-empowered consumer.
• Fuel brand authority with unique expertise.
• Focus on business outcomes.

The super-empowered consumer, using new tools to expand discovery options and navigate any type of decision, has set an entirely new bar for brands. As the ways of searching have grown and transformed, consumers are searching with rich context, digging into niche topics, and asking highly specific questions that simply weren’t possible a few years ago.

While consumer behaviors continue to change, people are still fundamentally curious. Google’s generative experiences remain anchored in core ranking and quality systems to help organize information and make it accessible and useful. As Daniel Shin Un Kang, head of organic and agentic search at Expedia Group, recently told us, “The fundamentals of delighting consumers haven’t changed. What has changed is the medium of search, from keywords to conversations.”

So while there is a technical revolution driving an evolution in Search behavior, Google’s core guidance remains durable and focused on user needs. But durable doesn’t mean your strategy should stay static. Searches are now multimodal, conversational, and deeply research driven. The bar your brand must clear is much higher. The leading CMOs I speak with are realizing that keeping pace with this super-empowered consumer means one thing: putting genuine helpfulness at the absolute center of their content strategy to capture intentional discovery throughout their journey.

For marketers, it requires optimizing your content to delight your customers and to meet people’s needs, so your brand can provide authentic, specific responses. When you do that, Search will recognize it and people will find you.

Search visibility has always come down to authority and helpfulness. And now, with the help of LLMs, people can dig deeper to find the expertise that satisfies their curiosity. People are able to go beyond asking short, simple keyword-based questions and instead ask highly specific or nuanced questions they never thought possible. As Search becomes more conversational and natural, it creates opportunities for follow-up questions and opportunities for brands to join the conversation.

For the CMOs I speak with, this unlocks a massive new playing field. Competition was often about going after a limited set of broad search terms and topics with generic, commodity-style content. Today, when a consumer asks something incredibly specific and your brand is the one with the answer, that’s where a real connection begins.

Take a running store, for example. Instead of publishing a generic “Top 10 Things to Consider,” they could create a deep-dive video analyzing exactly why a specific customer’s running shoes collapsed. That isn’t a generic review anyone could have written. It’s highly specific, real-world advice. That unique expertise is your brand advantage.

To find that expertise, you have to understand how Search surfaces information today. We’re designing our generative features to highlight the best of the web, including blogs, videos, and forum discussions, especially when it comes to product discovery. You can’t control all of those external conversations. But where you do have control, you need to make the experience flawless. Your websites, apps, and product feeds must be fast, rich, and user friendly.

IKEA has seen how Search helpfully connects their content with curious shoppers. As Linda Ha, deputy CMO, explains: “Search helps bring our expertise to them. For example, planning a kitchen is such a complex journey, but now it’s so easy with the new era of Search. We can show our experiences by telling them what complements their complete kitchen. It’s really brought us so many more opportunities. We’re showing up in a much more relevant and personalized way.”

This requires investing in the performance and structure of your apps, feeds, content, and websites. As Ha adds, “We’re working closely across paid, owned, and earned [media] to ensure that we show up in the way that we want to, and that way we can really double down on our home-furnishing expertise.”

Just as the fundamentals of delighting customers hasn’t changed, the fundamentals of your business also still hold. That means continuing to measure and scale plans based on real business goals like leads or sales, not unproven proxy metrics.

We know there’s a lot of pressure to demonstrate readiness for this new era and to show returns to finance partners, executive leadership, and boards. And marketers need more insight into how your brand authority is showing up in generative Search experiences. So we’ve been improving our tools to help you understand how people are finding you with visual Search queries, how your social and video content performs in Search, and how your generative AI traffic scales with dedicated Search and Discover reports. These tools will help your teams better understand your site’s Search visibility within generative features.

Focus on helping your customer, and they will find you

In an assistive search environment, commercial messaging cannot function as passive, one-way announcements. Your content strategy should focus on providing help and value to your intended customer.

Search in the Gemini era is expanding the ecosystem. New, intelligent, and responsive Search features depend on the open web to provide depth, accuracy, and trust. The demand for credible, authoritative brand perspectives has never been higher.