AI is becoming another place where brands compete for attention, but marketing teams are still figuring out how to influence what customers see. A new survey of 200 U.S. marketing and communications professionals by Sword and the Script Media finds that nearly half consider AI visibility significant, while the industry remains divided over which functions, channels and tactics actually shape visibility in AI-generated answers.
For years, marketers have optimized websites for search engines, bought media to reach audiences and relied on public relations to shape brand perception. Generative AI is creating another discovery layer—and companies are still working out how to compete within it.
A new survey from Sword and the Script Media suggests marketers increasingly recognize the importance of that shift, but there is little agreement about how AI visibility should be managed.
The survey polled 200 U.S.-based marketing and communications professionals in July. Nearly half of respondents, 47%, said AI visibility is either significant or highly significant to their organizations. Another 19% described it as moderately significant.
The numbers suggest AI-generated discovery has moved beyond being a niche concern for experimentation teams. Yet the survey also exposes a strategic gap: companies are paying attention to AI visibility without necessarily having a clear organizational owner or playbook.
“Marketers tend to fall into three camps: advocates, fence-sitters and skeptics,” said Frank Strong, president of Sword and the Script. His interpretation is that more marketers are becoming convinced that AI is changing customer and prospect behavior.
That behavioral shift is important.
Traditional search optimization is built around ranking pages for queries. AI visibility is more complicated because consumers can increasingly ask systems such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot to summarize markets, compare vendors or recommend products without necessarily visiting the underlying websites.
For brands, the question becomes not only whether a page ranks, but whether the company’s information is represented accurately and prominently in AI-generated responses.
Executives are already asking about AI visibility
The issue is also reaching the C-suite.
According to the survey, 63% of respondents said business leaders outside marketing had asked their teams about AI visibility. Twenty-nine percent said those questions had come up multiple times, while 34% had been asked once or twice.
That level of executive attention could accelerate the development of AI visibility strategies.
But there is an immediate organizational problem: no single marketing function appears to own the discipline.
Marketing operations ranked first at 17%, followed by product marketing at 14%, social media at 13%, and creative/design at 13%. PR and communications accounted for only 3%.
The result points to a familiar enterprise technology problem. AI visibility crosses organizational boundaries because the information AI systems use to understand a company can come from corporate websites, news coverage, third-party publications, social channels, product documentation and other sources.
Trying to assign ownership to one team may therefore be difficult.
Paid media gets the highest score—but the finding is contentious
One of the survey’s more surprising findings concerns which channels marketers believe have the greatest influence on AI visibility.
Paid media was selected by 35% of respondents, followed by shared media at 28%, earned media at 24% and owned media at 14%.
That view conflicts with other research and industry analysis suggesting that earned media, news coverage, press releases and authoritative editorial content can play an important role in how organizations become visible within AI-generated information environments.
Gartner, for example, has argued that public relations and communications teams should have a leading role in AI visibility efforts.
The disagreement reveals how immature the discipline remains.
Unlike traditional SEO, where marketers have decades of accumulated experience around crawling, indexing, links and ranking signals, generative AI visibility is still evolving. Different AI systems use different retrieval, ranking and model-training mechanisms, and their behavior can change rapidly.
As a result, marketers should be cautious about treating any single channel as a guaranteed lever.
Most marketers think they already have the skills
Despite uncertainty around tactics, respondents were relatively confident in their own capabilities.
Sixty-five percent agreed or strongly agreed that their teams have the knowledge, skills and resources needed to improve AI visibility. Twenty-six percent were neutral, while 11% disagreed or strongly disagreed.
That confidence may prove useful—but it could also create a measurement challenge.
AI visibility is not simply another performance metric that can be copied from traditional search analytics. Marketing teams need to establish what they actually want to measure: brand mentions, accuracy of AI-generated descriptions, inclusion in recommendations, citation frequency, referral traffic, sentiment or influence on downstream demand.
The measurement framework is still developing.
AI could make human expertise more valuable
The survey offers another notable finding: marketers largely do not expect AI to diminish the value of human expertise.
Sixty-one percent said AI visibility would make human expertise more or much more important. Twenty-nine percent expected no meaningful change, while 10% believed human expertise would become less important.
That perspective reflects a broader shift in marketing technology.
AI can generate content at enormous scale, but scale alone does not establish authority. In an environment increasingly filled with machine-generated material, original research, credible experts, distinctive points of view and trustworthy sources may become more important differentiators.
This has implications for content strategy.
Companies that respond to AI with automated content production alone risk creating more information without creating more authority. Organizations that invest in subject-matter expertise, original data, strong editorial standards and credible external validation may have a stronger foundation for AI-era discovery.
AI visibility is becoming a cross-functional discipline
For marketing leaders, the survey’s central message may be less about any particular channel and more about organizational readiness.
If executives are asking about AI visibility, but no team owns it, companies could end up with fragmented efforts: SEO teams monitoring AI search, PR teams pursuing earned media, content teams publishing material and social teams building audience signals without a shared measurement framework.
The next step is likely to be a more integrated approach.
Marketing organizations will need to understand how AI systems describe their brands, identify the sources those systems appear to rely on, improve the quality and consistency of available information, and determine whether visibility translates into meaningful business outcomes.
As Strong put it, the challenge has two parts: understanding how AI visibility affects a company’s brand and teaching teams what influences those results.
For now, the survey shows an industry that has recognized the problem before it has settled on the solution.
Market Landscape
AI visibility is emerging at the intersection of SEO, generative AI, public relations, content marketing, digital advertising and brand strategy.
The rise of answer engines changes the traditional discovery funnel. Consumers can increasingly receive synthesized recommendations from AI systems rather than clicking through a conventional list of search results.
That creates both opportunity and uncertainty for marketers.
Google, Microsoft and OpenAI are developing AI-driven discovery experiences, while established SEO and marketing platforms are adding tools designed to monitor brand presence in generative results.
The competitive challenge is that there is no universal “AI ranking” system. Retrieval, model behavior, citations and response generation vary between platforms.
For enterprise teams, the practical response is therefore broader than conventional SEO: build authoritative information, strengthen brand entities, maintain consistent product and corporate data, earn credible third-party coverage and continuously monitor how AI systems represent the organization.
Top Insights
- 47% of surveyed marketers consider AI visibility significant, signaling growing executive attention as ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI systems influence customer discovery.
- 63% say non-marketing executives have asked about AI visibility, increasing pressure on marketing leaders to develop measurable strategies and cross-functional ownership.
- No marketing function clearly owns AI visibility, revealing an organizational gap spanning SEO, PR, content, product marketing, social and marketing operations.
- Paid media ranked highest as an AI visibility influence, although competing research points toward earned media and authoritative content, underscoring uncertainty around emerging AI discovery signals.
- 61% believe human expertise becomes more valuable, suggesting original research, credible experts and authoritative content could differentiate brands as AI-generated information proliferates.
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