At 21st Century Brand we have spent the last 18 months asking a deceptively simple question: When someone asks an AI system to recommend a brand in your category, how does it choose that brand?
The answer has very little to do with who spends the most on marketing. It has everything to do with the quality, consistency, and credibility of the signals a brand leaves across the open web, and whether those signals add up to something a machine can interpret with confidence.
Think about it this way. We started building brands for humans. Then we built for algorithms.
We are now entering a new frontier: machine-readable differentiation. And most brands are not ready for it.
THE EVALUATOR HAS CHANGED
About 50% of web users are now searching using LLMs. Organic search is projected to decline by 50% by 2028. AI-qualified visitors are already 4.4 times more valuable than traditional search traffic, according to Semrush. The customer journey is increasingly being mediated by systems that evaluate brands in milliseconds, drawing on thousands of signals simultaneously.
The brands that succeed in this environment are doing the fundamentals extraordinarily well. The principles have not changed, but the evaluator has.
4 LEVERS
We worked with Semrush’s dataset that spans millions of prompts across dozens of categories, to develop a new go-to-market model for the AI era. We identified four variables with the greatest impact on how brands are understood and recommended by AI systems, finding that most brands are weak on two of them.
1. Coherence
Coherence is about presenting a consistent, differentiated narrative that people can easily understand and AI systems can accurately interpret. Notion, one of the world’s fastest-growing B2B brands, generates over 96,000 AI mentions per month, reaching an audience of 575 million. The reason? Its value proposition is so clearly aligned with product experience that AI systems describe the brand in consistent terms across 15 countries and multiple languages. However, in the AI customer journey, coherence is a product and strategy problem.
2. Currency
Currency is about staying active and relevant in the conversations AI systems draw from. Our research also found that Lego reaches a monthly AI audience of 1.2 billion across 10,000 live topics. The decisive driver of that presence is a business model built to generate continuous cultural momentum. This includes a steady cadence of product launches, partnerships, and community participation that gives people reasons to talk about the brand every single week. Currency cannot be switched on for a campaign. It has to be built into how the company operates.
3. Authority
Authority is about being endorsed by credible voices and sources in your category. Our analysis found that Shopify has grown its AI mentions to 1.1 billion audience members, increasing mentions by 360% in six months. It has done so through an authority model distributed across more than 119,000 cited pages spanning developers, partners, reviewers, and communities.
The lesson here is that superlative authority will increasingly come from a broader and distributed validation ecosystem instead of a small number of high-status endorsements.
4. Advocacy
Advocacy is about creating experiences people want to recommend and that AI systems recognize as positive sentiment. Our analysis found that Patagonia maintains a steady global AI visibility score of 69 out of 100 because its values are embedded in the product in ways people can describe. Industry commentary on Patagonia’s success focuses on its bold values-driven activism. In reality, its success is actually grounded in its product values: durability, repairability, lifecycle. These are characteristics people encounter and talk about. And crucially, they are driving the advocacy that AI systems are picking up on. What the brand says and what customers say about their experience are aligned.
COHERENCY IN THE C-SUITE
Here is the uncomfortable truth most marketing teams are not yet saying out loud: A marketing department cannot improve performance across these four levers alone.
Coherence requires product and marketing to align around a value proposition that actually reflects what customers experience. Currency requires upstream commitment from leadership to build the kind of company that generates ongoing reasons to exist in culture. Authority requires an ecosystem strategy that goes far beyond PR. Advocacy requires an honest reckoning with the gap between brand promise and product reality.
The CMOs leading through this moment will use it as a mandate to play a more central role in how their organizations communicate and operate. The four levers are a brand-building framework, while acting on them is a whole company challenge.
The brands that understand this earliest will quickly compound their advantage. AI systems favor consistency, credibility, and genuine advocacy. So do customers. The two audiences, it turns out, want exactly the same thing.
Neil Barrie is cofounder and CEO of 21st Century Brand.