How Generative AI Is Changing the Face of Marketing

Once, you could buy your way into being seen. A prime-time TV spot, a billboard on the highway, the top slot on a search results page. That was the game: get visible, stay visible and the rest would follow. But a new force is rewriting how brands are discovered, trusted and chosen and it’s changing the rules faster than most marketers realise.

Generative AI is transforming how people discover brands. According to Bain & Company, 80% of consumers now use AI summaries for at least 40% of their searches, leading to a 25% drop in traditional website clicks. Instead of static search results or conventional ads, people are posing complex questions to AI, looking for nuanced, trustworthy answers that feel personal and credible. In this new reality, a brand’s visibility depends on whether it shows up in the stories AI chooses to tell.

And those stories aren’t dictated by your media plan. They’re forged in the wild, in the headlines you didn’t write and the conversations you can’t buy your way into.

This is where organic social and earned media become essential. AI doesn’t just scan websites; it pulls from news articles, TikTok videos, podcast mentions, Reddit threads, Instagram comments and community forums. The more your brand appears authentically in these spaces, the more likely it is to surface in AI-powered discovery tools like ChatGPT, Google SGE or the next Alexa.

At ATTN:, we’ve built our reputation on creating cultural relevance that money can’t buy, crafting work that sparks conversation, builds trust and travels far beyond paid placements. And as GEO pushes those signals to the centre of purchase decisions, this isn’t just top-of-funnel magic anymore. It’s a bottom-line growth engine. We couldn’t be more excited by this.

We recently worked on a campaign for PATTERN, the haircare brand founded by Tracee Ellis Ross. It’s a challenger brand, only five years old but one that sparked an enormous wave of cultural conversation. The campaign drove over 1 billion press impressions and tens of millions of organic social impressions. It was powered almost entirely by earned media and social buzz. Not long after, I opened ChatGPT and asked: What’s the best haircare brand for Black women? PATTERN topped the list. Right behind it? Cécred, Beyoncé’s newly launched line—another brand that’s been riding a wave of press and conversation.

Neither topped the list because of a paid search strategy, scale of distribution or mass awareness. They showed up because they were talked about. Because they became trusted. Because they were visible in culture.

Earned and organic content build the credibility that AI systems rely on. They inform the algorithms that your brand is not only present but relevant. Not just optimised but valued. Organic and earned are the new performance marketing.

For brands in saturated or commoditised categories, this shift is urgent. When AI is asked, 'What’s the best luxury EV?' or 'What’s a good skincare brand for sensitive skin?', it’s not just parsing product specs. It’s scanning for trust signals, cultural resonance and authority—things you can’t buy.

Building brand salience now means showing up where culture is created and trust is earned. It means building communities, making content people want to talk about and leaning into storytelling that lives beyond your site map and ad buys.

In short, your next best marketing strategy might not be SEO or paid advertising at all. It might be a sharp take in The New York Times, a standout collab on Instagram or a campaign that lights up the internet because it taps into something real, resonant and worth talking about.

Generative AI is changing the front door and organic social and earned media are holding the keys.