What AI Search Means for Brand Visibility: A Conversation with Omnicom’s Erin Lanuti

Summary

Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
Episode: What AI Search Means for Brand Visibility: A Conversation with Omnicom’s Aaron Lanoudi
Release Date: May 12, 2025

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Introduction

In this insightful episode of the Marketecture Podcast, hosts Ari Paparo and Eric Franchi engage in a compelling conversation with Aaron Lanoudi, Chief Innovation Officer of Omnicom PR. The discussion centers on the transformative impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on search behaviors and brand visibility. Recorded at the Markitector Live conference in New York, this episode delves deep into how AI-driven search (LLM search) differs fundamentally from traditional search algorithms and what this means for brands striving to maintain their presence in an evolving digital landscape.

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The Shift from Traditional to AI Search

Alex Sherman opens the discussion by introducing Bluefish, an AI SEO marketing platform designed to help brands manage their visibility within AI-driven search environments.

Key Points:

• Traditional Search vs. AI Search: Traditional search algorithms rank content based on authority and relevance, directing users to specific websites through clickable links. In contrast, AI search utilizes Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate narrative responses directly to user queries, fostering a conversational interaction.

• User Engagement with AI Search: A notable challenge is the inaccuracy inherent in LLMs, with a reported 20% hallucination rate, leading to potential misinformation about brands.

Notable Quote:

“AI actually analyzes the content and the websites and then uses that to understand the query. Then the LLM writes the actual narrative back to the consumer and you have a conversation.”
— Aaron Lanoudi [02:34]

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Challenges of AI Search for Brands

Aaron Lanoudi highlights the critical issues brands face with the rise of AI search, emphasizing the lack of awareness and control over how their brands are portrayed.

Key Points:

• Visibility Concerns: Many brands are unaware of how LLMs represent them, leading to potential misrankings or misrepresentations. For instance, a mid-sized car rental company was inaccurately described as accommodating 15 pieces of luggage in the trunk.

• Impact of Agentic AI: AI's ability to make autonomous decisions based on user prompts can adversely affect category leaders if their products are not prioritized correctly.

Notable Quote:

“If I'm the category leader of brown mascara and I'm not chosen, that's a problem.”
— Aaron Lanoudi [04:23]

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Strategies for Managing AI Search

Transitioning from challenges to solutions, the conversation shifts to actionable strategies brands can adopt to navigate the AI search landscape effectively.

Key Points:

• Comprehensive AI Audits: Brands need to assess their visibility, share of voice, sentiment, and comparative standing against competitors within AI-generated responses.

• Correcting Misinformation: Addressing inaccuracies is paramount to ensure that AI narratives about products or services are both accurate and favorable.

• Optimizing Content for AI: Content, including Product Detail Pages (PDPs) and brand websites, must be restructured to align with AI's preference for Q&A formats over traditional charts and graphics.

Notable Quote:

“The first step is to really understand the lay of the land. Right. And where are you from there? It's about correcting misinformation or inaccuracies about your product or service.”
— Aaron Lanoudi [05:42]

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Omnicom's AIOptics Initiative

In a significant development, Aaron Lanoudi announces Omnicom PR's latest solution, AIOptics, designed to empower brands in the AI search arena.

Key Components of AIOptics:

1. AI Audit: Evaluates visibility, share of voice, sentiment, and competitive ranking.
2. Misinformation Correction: Fixes inaccuracies related to the brand’s products or services.
3. Optimization: Integrates efforts across PR, commerce, search, and content teams to leverage narratives and keywords identified by LLMs.
4. Content Creation: Ensures consistent generation of first and third-party content, optimizing brand websites and PDPs for AI search.

Notable Quote:

“We believe this is a huge space that marketers really need to jump in because not doing so is corporate and reputational risk, not to mention sales risk.”
— Aaron Lanoudi [16:07]

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Future Predictions for AI Marketing

Looking ahead, Aaron Lanoudi shares his insights on the rapid evolution of AI in marketing and the essential steps brands must take to stay ahead.

Key Points:

• Accelerated Adoption: Brands will increasingly adopt AI search to maintain control over brand narratives and protect sales.

• Impact on Marketing Stack: The introduction of AI-driven shopping experiences will disrupt traditional marketing funnels, necessitating a complete overhaul of marketing strategies.

• Emerging Trends: The rise of Agentic AI will further intensify the need for brands to engage proactively with AI search technologies.

Notable Quote:

“Reddit is the most influential source about our brand. These micro-influencers on YouTube that ChatGPT is learning from.”
— Alex Sherman [14:55]

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Conclusion

The episode concludes with a consensus that AI search represents a paradigm shift in how brands interact with consumers. The rapid pace at which AI technologies are being integrated requires brands to adopt comprehensive strategies encompassing auditing, misinformation correction, optimization, and content creation. Omnicom PR's AIOptics initiative emerges as a pivotal solution tailored to address these challenges, underscoring the imperative for brands to embrace AI-driven search mechanisms to safeguard their visibility and reputation.

Final Thoughts:

“Hopefully everyone's seen that Gartner is predicting that 25% of all search will shift to AI search by 2026.”
— Aaron Lanoudi [16:07]

This episode serves as a crucial guide for marketers and brands aiming to navigate the complexities of AI search, offering both strategic insights and practical solutions to thrive in an AI-driven digital ecosystem.

Transcript

[Host]

This podcast is brought to you by audiohook, the leading independent audio dsp. Audiohook has direct publisher integrations into all major podcast and streaming radio platforms, providing 40% more inventory than what could be accessed in omnichannel DSPs. What's more, audiobook has full transcripts on more than 90% of all podcast inventory, enabling advanced contextual targeting and brand suitability. Audio Hook is so confident that in addition to CPM buys, they offer the industry's only pay for performance option, where brands can scale audio and podcasting with peace of mind mind knowing they are only paying for outcomes. Visit audiohook.com to learn more. That's audiohook.com this week we have a recording that was done at the Markitector Live conference in New York in March. This is a really interesting one. We have Alex Sherman, who's the CEO and founder of Bluefish, an AI SEO marketing platform, and he's in conversation with Aaron Lanoudi, who is the CIO of Omnicom pr, and they're talking about AI and how marketers and agencies can harness it to get more attention, more traffic, and to reach their customers. So hope you enjoy that conversation.

[Alex Sherman]

Awesome. Well, thank you. As he mentioned, I'm the CEO of Bluefish. We are a marketing platform for AI. So the way to think about that is that our technology essentially helps the largest brands and agencies in the world gain visibility and influence over how AI describes their brand, their products, their services to consumers. Super excited to have a conversation about AI marketing. Especially excited to be here with Erin Lanoudi, one of our fantastic customers. She is the Chief Innovation Officer of Omnicom PR. She leads global innovation and all of OPRG's global AI initiatives. Welcome.

[Aaron Lanoudi]

Thank you. Thank you.

[Alex Sherman]

So just to get started and kind of kick things off and sort of orient the audience, I know you, Aaron and Omnicom have been super early adopters of AI marketing and have moved relatively quickly to start to help your customers start to manage their presence in this new channel. Can you just talk a little bit about the why now? And why there's sort of urgency for brands to start to manage the channel?

[Aaron Lanoudi]

Sure. So for starters, happy St. Patrick's Day, everybody.

[Alex Sherman]

Woo.

[Aaron Lanoudi]

With a name like Erin, I'm not wearing green, so I feel a little off, so I have to wish everyone a happy St. Patrick's Day. So why now? I think everyone has been watching over the last 18 months the changes in search behavior. And if you think about it, all of us are familiar with Google, right? And the Google search Results that we get back. And that's really traditional search, where a search algorithm analyzes the content and the sites. It then ranks it for authority and then determines what links it's going to give you that the user then clicks and goes to experience whatever that content is. Well, LLM search or AI search is very different from that. In this instance, the AI actually analyzes the content and the websites and then uses that to understand the query. Then the LLM writes the actual narrative back to the consumer and you have a conversation. Right. So sometimes it's also called conversational AI. So very, very different experience. How many people in this room have tried conversational search or AI search, whatever you want to call it? Okay, so a lot of people so far. And have the results you've gotten back been accurate every time? No, no hands, zero hands. Right. And that's because LLMs hallucinate 20% of the time. Right. So you have a one in five chance that the answer coming out of that LLM is inaccurate. So if you're a brand having an LLM write the results back about your product or service, you should be really concerned.

[Alex Sherman]

Yeah, totally. I think there's a lot of talk and this happens every time. There's a new marketing channel where everybody does this kind of like square peg, round hole thing where they take the patterns of the past and they try to sort of force fit it into the new channel. And so it makes sense that marketers and brands would talk about this AI search as kind of like search 2.0. But the reality is, as Aaron was saying, is that it functions completely differently. Right. So like traditional SEO is about optimizing for a search algorithm. And the result of that optimization, optimization is basically a rank on a SERP where there's sort of a clickable link consumer can click through and end up on your website where you as a brand, as a marketer have the opportunity to tell your story. Well, AI functions very differently. The outcome is an actual response to the consumer that describes your product, that describes your service. And so you have to feed that in totally distinct ways. And so we've seen the emergence of kind of this new practice. So Aaron, given sort of your early experience in the space, help us kind of anchor, like how aware would you say are brands of both the rise of AI as a new channel and how it is actually portraying their products and services to consumers? Like, where would you say brands are?

[Aaron Lanoudi]

So I would say brands are very aware of AI. Right. But I don't think brands are aware of what a significant Change AI search is for brands and that's a real risk. Right. Because brands right now, the vast majority of them don't understand one what are the LLMs saying about them? Right. And I can tell you the feedback from the LLMs from let's say ChatGPT to Gemini to Perplexity is very, very different. So you could have a brand that's a category leader, as we have done, where we've run the analysis and. And they don't even rank. Right. They don't even show up or they show up incorrectly. Right. We had one client where it actually said for a mid sized car rental you could fit 15 pieces of luggage in the trunk. Well, that's not going to happen. Right. So you've got real issues, whether it be from a product being portrayed. Right. The efficacy of a product, how they're talking about your brand. These are real concerns. And you couple that with agentic AI. Right. Which is here and things like OpenAI operate, where if I tell OpenAI operate to buy me a brown mascara, it's going to choose the brown mascara based on how that ranks in the results and what it thinks is good for me. Well, if I'm the category leader of brown mascara and I'm not chosen again, that's a problem. Right. So brands really need to start understanding this space.

[Alex Sherman]

Yeah. And I think the complexity goes sort of even deeper as well. And I think marketers are starting to realize that AI is super personalized. Like the response that you get from an AI provider is personalized to that individual, to their prompt, to their needs. And so I might be a weekend warrior in New York that is searching for new running sneakers and get a totally different portrayal of Adidas or Nike that than maybe a Gen Z user in California. And so from a marketing point of view now you have this new level of fragmentation that you need to manage both in terms of sort of what you're tracking but what you're doing about it. So let's get into that. So let's sort of demystify kind of AI marketing. If I'm a brand and I want to get started, I see that consumers are using AI to find my products and services. I want to take action. I'm a cmo, I'm an agency that's supporting them. Like what does getting started look like? Help us understand that.

[Aaron Lanoudi]

So the first thing is you need to understand what the LLMs are saying about you. Right. So you need to understand are you visible? How do you rank? What is it saying about you? From a favorability perspective, is it positive or negative? Where do you compare to, let's say, your competitors? Right. We know that the LLMs actually over index on negative, which is a problem. Right. So the first step is to really understand the lay of the land. Right. And where are you from there? It's about correcting misinformation or inaccuracies about your product or service. Obviously, that's huge. And then it's about understanding narratives that exist out there. You want to make sure that whatever is being said one is accurate. But you also want to ride the wave of the narratives, understand the keywords and the messages that are being used, and then make sure that your content, whether it be on brand.com or on your PDPs is getting optimized for those things. And I can tell you, with the big brands that we work with, we're finding some of the PDPs aren't even visible on Rufus. Right. Again, that's a problem. Some of the content that's being written needs to be restructured. It doesn't like charts and graphics. Right. So it has to be almost rewritten in almost a Q and A type format. So you're getting the right type of results. So those are some of the things that I think are really important for brands to be thinking about right now.

[Alex Sherman]

Yeah, this rise of AI monitoring and AI optimization, it's sort of incredible how quickly this space has evolved. Like when we started Bluefish in 2023, you know, the primary users of AI tools, you know, it was, it was ChatGPT, it was perplexity. Super powerful technologies, but from a marketer's point of view, still relatively niche in 2023. And since then, I think we all know what happened. You know, obviously those platforms scaled up quite a bit, but also the rest of the Internet became the AI Internet. Right. Like every big tech company essentially became an AI company. So Google launched AI Overviews, Amazon launched Rufus, Microsoft launched Copilot, Meta, AI, et cetera. And so in a very, very short period of time, these sort of early notions of AI monitoring and optimization all of a sudden transitioned from, hey, this is nice to have. We should future proof our marketing team into something that was just totally essential. So let's click into that a little bit. So on the optimization piece, on the taking action side, how are brands starting to sort of work with agencies like yours around content marketing? What are the teams involved? What does that look like in practice?

[Aaron Lanoudi]

So I think, for starters, I would say it's a team sport. It's different from Search and the response needs to be different. So we're finding that pr, search, commerce and the content team all need to come together. So those teams need to be looking at the narratives that are out there, building a collective, cohesive strategy for how do you respond to it, which then feeds the content team. But again, the LLMs prioritize first and third party content with an emphasis or an over index on third party content over first party content. So it's things like making sure you're getting content out there from influencers or news outlets. Thought leadership is a big driver. And then of course, obviously optimizing your brand content and your PDP pages. These are all the things. But again, it all needs to work together to have the best result.

[Alex Sherman]

Yeah, it's been really interesting. So we spend a lot of time kind of tracking AI responses to understand what are the key themes, what are the key topics, which sources are most influential? We all know that LLMs are trained on the Internet and the Internet is a collection of websites. But what does that actually mean? Which sources are most influential to these models and how they describe a brand? And, and it has been amazing to understand that split between first party sources and third party sources across all of the different types of prompts. Have there been any surprises that you've sort of come across with your customers? Anything that sort of emerged as like, oh my God, I can't believe this is happening.

[Aaron Lanoudi]

So I think some of the biggest shocks to us are the sources that the LLMs are prioritizing to give the answers. There are sources that the LLMs are frequently citing that we had no knowledge of, frankly, until we started seeing them rank super high. So it's very interesting to really lean into the sources that the LLMs are prioritizing because they're not the traditional ones that you would think of. And again, that just comes with digging into the space, learning what's going on and what's being said.

[Alex Sherman]

Yeah, it does end up being this team sport. Typically when we start working with a brand or with an agency, there are a lot of search marketers in the room. They're kind of fastest to see that the ground is shifting. We need to take action. But if you look at the sort of composition of who's in the room in those meetings, like three weeks later, four weeks later, all of a sudden you start seeing the brand marketing team, the content marketing team, analytics is there. The data teams are sort of wondering what sort of infrastructure needs to exist here. And inevitably they're reacting to this totally new environment where oh my God. Reddit is the most influential source about our brand. These micro influencers on yout what ChatGPT is learning from. And so they do have to kind of rethink, okay, what are our sort of internal workflows? Like when we're creating new content, whether it's on a website or PDPs, or whether it's our paid editorial team, there's this new sort of map that's emerging. And by the way, that map is changing all the time. AI is not pulling on some fixed database about your brand. It's coming up with a response in real time. And so the velocity of marketing with AI marketing has changed quite a bit. And it's a good thing that AI is a good technology that you can use to do all of this. But certainly the pace has accelerated.

[Aaron Lanoudi]

And let's talk about the metrics, because the metrics are completely changing right now. Brands, look at what's the traffic to my website, what's the click through rate? Those metrics all need to change because you're not having links to take you to brand.com, this is a conversation. So it's about your presence, your visibility, how often is your brand.com basically being referenced by the AI? These are very, very different metrics. But at the same point, we've been in meetings where we've heard people say, well, I don't need brand.com anymore. Well, that's completely wrong. You absolutely need brand.com because that is what helps the AI and the LLMs understand how to answer queries. Right. It is a major source of that information. It's just how we value that content and the information there that's different. Right. The measurement and the metrics that we use against it.

[Alex Sherman]

Yeah. So I know Omnicom is leaning really aggressively into this new sort of AI marketing space. Can you tell the audience and give us kind of a sneak peek around what you guys have in store? Are there any major initiatives we should know about?

[Aaron Lanoudi]

Yeah. So we believe this is a huge space that marketers really need to jump in because not doing so is corporate and reputational risk, not to mention sales risk. So I am pleased to announce the creation of AIOptics. It is a new solution from OPRG that essentially has four components to was built in partnership with Bluefish and other partners. And it allows us to do four things. So the first is to help brands get an AI audit. Right. Understand what is your visibility, what is your share of voice, what is the sentiment? How do you rank against your competitors? The Second is to correct misinformation about your product or service offering, which is huge. And then third is optimization. Again, going back to the team sport. Right. We want to make sure that PR and commerce and your search team and your content team are all mining the information coming from the LLMs. There is really rich information that you can go into the LLMs to understand the narratives that are being out there, the keywords, the messages, the top sources that the LLMs are citing to give you that feedback. Right. All of this information is hugely powerful to get to the fourth point, which is content creation. So making sure that there is first and third party content being consistently created, that your PDPs and brand.com are optimized for AI search, all really important right now. Hopefully everyone's seen that Gartner is predicting that 25% of all search will shift to AI search by 2026. That is a pretty major shift. So all brands we believe need to be moving into this space quickly to protect their brands and their sales in this new world order.

[Alex Sherman]

Awesome. And so we have a QR code somewhere. We put that up. So folks want to learn more about AI optics, what do they need to do? How does this work?

[Aaron Lanoudi]

Click the QR code and we will get you more information on AI optics. Thank you.

[Alex Sherman]

Amazing. So we have just a few minutes left. It's prediction time. So where does this go? What is the future of AI marketing? Industry is evolving super quickly. We're seeing lots of brands getting in on the action, trying to make sure that they're winning share, they're not losing rank, that they're visible, they're portrayed accurately, positively. What's next? Where do you think this industry goes in the next 12 months or so?

[Aaron Lanoudi]

So I think that people are going to move really quickly into AI search because they have to. Right. Brands obviously don't like to be blind to things. Right. They like to control what's being said about them, they like to protect their sales. Both of which means they need to move pretty briskly into AI search. So I think that will be a big trend. I also think with Agentic rising, this is going to be much more of an imperative, probably very, very quickly.

[Alex Sherman]

Yeah. On the shopping front, it really does sort of feel like the calm before the storm. Obviously perplexity is here. They've had a very successful launch of their shopping product. But certainly you can imagine as the rest of these sort of consumers, consumer AI platforms rolls out their consumer shopping experiences entirely within the AI environment, you have this like paradigm shift, like organic marketing, paid marketing. It's all based on this kind of legacy notion of how consumers move through the funnel online. What happens when that's all within AI when sort of a consumer moves from awareness to engagement to purchase within an AI conversation and they don't crisscross the Internet, I mean that impacts the entire marketing stack. So we're going to see that happen really, really quickly.

[Aaron Lanoudi]

Agree.

[Alex Sherman]

Well cool. That's all the time that we had. So thank you Aaron for joining us and thank you guys. Appreciate it.

[Host]

Thank you for listening to the Market podcast. New episodes come out every Friday and an insightful vendor interview is pub each Monday. You can subscribe to our library of hundreds of executive interviews at marketecture tv. You can also sign up for free for our weekly newsletter with my original strategic insights on the week's news at News Market tv. And if you're feeling social, we operate a vibrant Slack community that you can apply to [e-mail].