Industry Insights & Trends

August 18th -

The way consumers discover brands is becoming one of the most interesting shifts in marketing.

Search, social media, creators, publishers, communities, marketplaces and AI all play a role in how people find products, gather information and make decisions. Consumers can move across several of these sources within minutes, creating more opportunities for discovery and a much more complicated visibility challenge for brands.

Marketers are already trying to reach new audiences across fragmented platforms, manage rising acquisition costs and understand increasingly complex paths to purchase. Now we are hearing another question more often: How do we make sure our brand shows up in AI-driven discovery?

The answer reaches much further than the brand's own content. Publishers bring expertise. Creators contribute firsthand experience. Communities contain years of conversations and shared knowledge. Reviews, social content, retailers and product information all help consumers understand what to buy, why it matters and whether it is right for them.

That decision may be one of the most valuable moments in the customer journey. The source that helps someone choose a product can have enormous influence on the eventual sale, even when another channel receives the conversion credit.

For brands, that creates a bigger question than how to appear in AI. Are we giving enough value to the places where consumers actually decide what to buy?

AI may give us a new way to see some of that influence. As publishers, creators and community conversations surface within AI-driven discovery, they provide another view into the sources helping consumers research, validate and choose products.

That raises a bigger question: Could AI show brands that one of their most valuable sources of discovery has been sitting inside a traditionally lower-priority channel all along?

Imagine someone preparing for a December trip to Tokyo.

Her skin tends to get extremely dry after long flights, she prefers lightweight skincare and she wants to keep her routine simple. She can bring that entire situation into the discovery process and start the conversation there.

Somewhere inside that conversation, she moves from describing a situation to considering specific products.

The amount of context builds quickly. Travel, climate, skin sensitivity, texture preference, previous product experience and other people's reviews can all become part of the same discovery process.

She may search for one of the products she discovered, watch someone use it on social, read comments from people with similar skin concerns or look for reviews from a publisher she trusts. She may check a retailer or marketplace for ratings, pricing and availability. A recommendation from a creator or conversation inside a beauty community may give her another product to consider and send her in a new direction.

Each of those interactions can add information, reinforce a recommendation or introduce another option.

Google has reported that queries in its AI-assisted search experience are averaging about three times the length of traditional searches. The number itself is useful, though the behavior behind it is more interesting. People can ask a full question, explain their situation and continue the conversation as new questions come up. Each detail can change which products become relevant.

Every detail a consumer adds to a search creates another opportunity for information from somewhere else to become relevant.

A publisher may have tested the product. A creator may show how it performs in real life. Customers describe their experiences in reviews and social posts. Communities compare products, answer questions and add years of shared experience. Retailers and marketplaces contribute specifications, pricing, availability and customer feedback.

For brands, this expands the idea of visibility to include the information and authority that exist around the brand across the wider web.

Publishers and commerce communities have traditionally been valued through traffic, clicks, conversions and sales. Those performance metrics still matter, while AI-assisted discovery introduces another potential layer of influence: the information these partners create can help shape discovery before a consumer ever reaches a trackable click.

That gives us a different way to think about the role of a publisher, creator or community in the path to purchase.

This kind of zero click influence creates a challenge for affiliate and partnership marketing because the value of publisher content may extend beyond the traffic and conversions we can directly attribute to it. If that content helps inform an AI generated answer, comparison or recommendation, it can play a role in discovery without producing a measurable visit. For brands, that makes the authority and relevance of their publisher and community relationships worth considering alongside traditional performance measures.

A recent analysis conducted with Rakuten gives us an early look at how these dynamics are showing up in Chinese-language AI discovery.

Across approximately 50 to 55 Chinese-language prompts, Dealmoon appeared in 48 prompts and more than 800 citations, representing 0.69% of total citation sources. Dealmoon also appeared more frequently than several established media properties, including Vogue Taiwan, Elle and Allure, with brand guides among its most frequently cited content.

Reddit, Instagram and YouTube were among the most frequently used sources, similar to Rakuten's English-language findings. In the Chinese-language analysis, Taobao appeared in 53 prompts and accounted for more than 3% of citations.

The source mix also raises an important question for global brands. If the sources shaping discovery change with language, audience and market context, AI visibility may need to be understood at the audience level as well.

Communities contain something especially useful for discovery: years of questions, recommendations, opinions and firsthand experiences created around shared interests and needs.

Think about the amount of context inside a beauty community. People discuss ingredients, routines, skin concerns, climates, price points, product preferences and what they actually repurchase. Travel communities contain advice shaped by destinations, seasons, budgets and personal experience. Shopping communities add conversations about brands, value, trends, gifting and products people are considering right now.

Community exists around publishers, creators and social platforms, and develops around shared interests, cultures, languages and life stages. Reviews, comments and Q&A add another layer of firsthand experience around individual products.

Brands have spent years optimizing the same ecommerce channels for incremental gains. Publishers and communities have often sat lower on the priority list, with much of their value measured through the traffic, conversions and revenue directly attributed to them.

AI discovery gives marketers another view into the influence those sources may have been creating all along. The opportunity is especially interesting for brands looking for new audiences, because publishers and communities can create discovery, provide validation and influence a purchase across multiple parts of the customer journey.

The Tokyo example started with dry skin after a long flight. A few questions later, products were being evaluated through climate, texture, personal preferences and other people's experiences.

Every question can introduce another consideration, source or product into the conversation. That growing space between a consumer's initial problem and the products they eventually consider is where the long tail of AI discovery becomes especially interesting.

The next piece will look at how deep those discovery conversations can go and what that means for upper-funnel discovery, search strategy and the moments that bring a brand into consideration.