In Scribewise and Scrunch’s 2026 AI search survey, we asked 600 marketing leaders about their AI search knowledge, and senior leaders were confident they had a plan: 84% said they thought they could influence how their brand shows up in AI answers.
But when we pressed them further, we found gaps between confidence and real AI search knowledge. Just over half (51%) aren’t sure their approach is right, and some marketers believe generative engine optimization (GEO)—the practice of shaping your content and online authority so AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews cite and recommend you—is just a new version of SEO. Only 41% of those we surveyed feel they can take their AI search data and do something with it.
Marketing leaders appear confident, but are not truly ready for this new AI search world.
They believe they can influence AI answers, yet most can’t measure that influence, act on the data or even define the work.
They dived into action, but almost half say they probably moved too fast without the right long-term strategy.
Marketers must understand these gaps and figure out how to close them.
These findings echo earlier research we conducted, so know that you and your marketing team are not alone. It also makes sense: Many leaders are feeling panicked by AI and the questions it poses. What happens to marketing over the next two to three years? How should we be using AI to work more efficiently? How do we upskill so we understand how AI can help us?
Marketing leaders are also catering to their C-suites’ needs to figure out how to use AI. So it’s not that surprising that leaders are saying they know what to do, but when you dig a little deeper or ask more junior folks doing the actual work, it becomes clear that they don’t really know what to do.
Here are a few gaps we saw in our data with some practical tips on how to close them.
Gap: Monitoring your brand in AI search
You can’t start improving your brand presence in AI search without understanding what people are searching for and knowing where you do and don’t show up. But our research showed that just 45% are testing visibility. To truly move the needle on your brand in AI search, professional services firms should understand their brand’s visibility in AI search prompts, analyze bot traffic to see which pages bots are retrieving and know what their brand sentiment is—when you do show up in answers, what’s the vibe? This data doesn’t show up in Google Analytics or a rank tracker; you’ll need an AI-visibility monitoring tool that runs prompts across platforms and records the results over time. Here’s what you should track:
- Presence: This is where an AI platform mentions your name in its response. You should have an understanding of which prompts to follow and who shows up when someone asks questions. For professional services firms, this can be tricky. It’s likely that someone looking for help will ask an expertise-, advice- or thought-leadership-oriented question first. They’re going to ask for help solving a problem before they ever ask for a firm that’s good at solving that particular problem. The key is to show up when they get to that point.
- Branded and non-branded citations: Branded citations are the URLs on your site that AI platforms send traffic to. Yes, your homepage is likely near the top. But what other service or blog pages get cited frequently?Non-branded citations are all the other URLs AI platforms use as sources when someone asks a question you are tracking. This is made up of competitors, review sites, trade publications, social media, etc. This intel can offer insight into which trade publications you should target for media relations and the types of content that resonate with your audience. You can use it to fuel content writing and media relations efforts to close the gap.
- Sentiment: When pages or sites mention your brand, what do they say about it? Sentiment is a measure of positive and negative feelings about your brand. If your sentiment score is low, you can home in on problem pages and take steps to improve your brand sentiment. This is good information to share with your marketing, sales and client-facing teams who can impact what folks may be getting wrong about your brand. It’s also good for the Comms team to know to head off any PR issues.
- Agent traffic: When you ask a question in an AI platform, it sends a retrieval bot out to find the answer. There are different categories of bots in addition to retrieval bots—indexer bots, training bots and uncategorized bots—all with roles. It’s important to ensure that AI bots can reach your content and retrieve it. If they can’t, you likely need to adjust your robots.txt file or network tool permissions.
Gap: Creating the right content strategy for AI visibility
Once you understand where your brand stands, it’s time to figure out what to do with it. And just like in the early days of SEO, there’s a right way and a wrong way to shape your brand’s standing. Our research showed that while 42% of brands are scaling their content, a surprising 77% of respondents are not optimizing the content they already have.
Fresh content that’s complete, concise and responsive to your audience’s questions can improve your presence in AI search. It might be tempting to churn out AI-generated content to fill those gaps, but even if that boosts your visibility, the results will almost certainly be temporary (and very possibly have a negative impact on your sentiment measures).
AI visibility is based on authority across the internet, which means it’s not just what you say about your brand on your website; it’s what other entities say about you, too. Firms that want to improve their AI search visibility should start by optimizing content that’s already on their website so it answers questions your audience is asking. Then, focus on thought leadership and public relations to boost your brand’s presence across the internet—and in turn, in AI answers.
Gap: Understanding how SEO fits into GEO
GEO is still a black box for many marketers and leaders. Our survey showed that 56% of marketers can’t tell AI search optimization from SEO. It doesn’t help that SEO firms (always a loud, outspoken crowd) are now selling GEO services that are not much different from traditional SEO. And 62% of marketing teams are still being judged on SEO metrics like site visits or rankings.
Good technical SEO gets your pages crawlable and indexable, which is table stakes for showing up in AI answers. GEO adds a layer on top—content structured so it gets pulled into AI answers and authority signals across the internet that show your brand is a credible source.
This distinction should inform what you measure. Add AI-search metrics alongside the traditional ones: presence, share of citations versus competitors, sentiment in those answers and whether AI bots can successfully retrieve your pages. Those are the numbers that tell you whether your GEO work is actually helping your brand.
Gap: Learning and upskilling for the future of marketing and AI
There’s no doubt that AI search is changing how B2B marketers work, and it often falls to small, nimble teams to absorb it on top of everything else they’re already doing. Put one person in charge of managing AI education: learning about platforms as they change, tracking where your brand shows up in AI and reporting what they’ve learned. That person needs time, clear direction and the right partner alongside them to get up to speed. This is where an experienced agency earns its keep: helping shape the strategy, interpret the data and set priorities as the platforms evolve.
Closing the gap
Closing the gap between how confident marketers feel and what they can actually influence doesn’t mean throwing out the work you’ve done. But it does mean adding some new tactics to your marketing strategy: monitoring where you stand, optimizing the content you already have, treating GEO as its own discipline rather than SEO by another name and building the in-house skillset to keep up. Do those, and the confidence your leadership already feels starts to be backed by results.