It’s no secret that AI is reshaping discovery, commerce, and consumer behavior. To help guide brands through this new discovery era, Acceleration Partners recently held a webinar with Chief Executive Officer Matt Wool, Nick Lafferty of Profound, and Jackie Goldstein of New York Post. The conversation centered around five key themes, which brands can incorporate into their strategies and drive performance as the AI landscape continues to evolve.
Search is shifting from a performance channel to a brand channel.
Search engines are no longer the sole driver of brand discovery. Instead, AI models are curating, synthesizing, and recommending results in real time. That shift is changing how brands are discovered, redefining how brands build trust, and challenging how we measure performance.
To compete, brands must fundamentally rethink how they approach growth in this new environment:
- From optimizing owned channels to earning visibility across third-party ecosystems
- From controlling messaging to influencing how they are represented by partners, publishers, and creators
- From measuring clicks to measuring presence, citations, and recommendations in AI-driven discovery
The brands that win will be those that can expand their footprint beyond their own channels, build strong partner ecosystems, and ensure the sources that AI trusts consistently surface their names.
AI doesn’t create trust. It sources it.
Editorially driven reviews and authentic creator insights provide depth and credibility that large language models favor, helping brands earn both visibility and trust in AI-driven discovery. As AI pulls from third-party ecosystems, partnerships are a primary way to extend reach beyond owned media and drive further discovery.
So, the question for brands is no longer just “How do we rank?” Instead, brands should ask, “Are we embedded in the sources AI trusts and surfaces?” And partnerships are a primary driver in the answer to that question.
AI has rewritten the funnel.
AI is fundamentally reshaping the traditional purchasing funnel by bringing discovery, evaluation, and decision-making into a single interaction. Influence is no longer confined to specific stages of the funnel, it’s happening simultaneously across the entire journey. Think of it this way:
AI is fundamentally reshaping the traditional purchasing funnel by bringing discovery, evaluation, and decision-making into a single interaction. Influence is no longer confined to specific stages of the funnel, it’s happening simultaneously across the entire journey. Think of it this way:
- The funnel is no longer linear: Consumers don’t move step-by-step. They jump straight from question to recommendation to decision.
- Channels are no longer siloed by funnel stage: Partnerships can now shape both awareness and conversion.
- Influence happens earlier and faster: Brands must be present at the moment AI generates the answer, not just when a user clicks through.
Brands can no longer fully control the narrative.
AI aggregates information from multiple sources, meaning that brands are no longer the sole owners of the message. According to Profound, only 5% of citations about your brand come directly from your .com. The other 95% originate from third parties. Third-party perspectives now play a much larger role in shaping perception. What publishers, creators, and reviewers say about a brand carries more weight than what the brand says about itself.
Historically, affiliate marketing has leaned toward tighter brand control. In contrast, influencer marketing has succeeded by allowing creators to interpret and communicate messaging in their own voice — that’s where the authenticity comes from. It’s becoming less in a brand’s interest to dictate what publishers say, and more in their interest to have a broader set of partners generating authentic, high-value brand references organically.
To orchestrate influence across an ecosystem, brands should focus on the following questions.
- How do we work effectively with partners?
- How do we ensure messaging is consistent across the ecosystem?
- How do we use AI and automation to monitor and maintain that consistency at scale?
We’re now in a zero-click reality.
As AI reshapes discovery, it’s also redefining how we measure performance across the search landscape. In this new zero-click reality, influence happens earlier in the journey, inside AI-generated answers, and often before a user even visits a website. This experience creates a real challenge: many of the signals brands have traditionally relied upon are becoming less visible. Clicks still matter, but they’re no longer the full story.
Brands need to rethink how they measure performance, shifting their focus from traffic alone to visibility, presence, and recommendation within AI-driven discovery. Look at how often your brand is mentioned in AI-generated responses, how often your brand is cited as a source, and if you’re the brand being recommended when consumers are asking what to buy.
AI-driven discovery is already reshaping how brands are found, evaluated, and recommended. The brands building the right partner ecosystems now will be the ones showing up in the sources AI trusts.
Watch the on-demand webinar to hear the full conversation, or get in touch with our team if you’re ready to think through what this means for your program.
