Brands are adding a new line to creator briefs: AI visibility. As more shoppers start product research in AI chatbots instead of traditional search engines, marketers are betting that creator content can put their brands in front of those queries. The strategy is early, measurement is still fuzzy, but agencies say clients are asking for it in nearly every pitch.
Large language models crawl social media, blogs, news sites and other public sources to answer search queries - much of that content comes from creators, not brands. "The machine is going towards the most accessible public information and the most authentic to get closer to an answer. That's not coming from the brand themselves," said Joe Gagliese, CEO at Viral Nation.
Why creators matter for AI search
Zoom started testing this approach over the summer with a campaign featuring creator-journalist Nayeema Raza, hiring her to build the company's authority and credibility through storytelling. The idea: positive creator coverage becomes the source material LLMs draw from when answering questions about a brand.
Measurement hasn't caught up yet, and that's true across the AI visibility landscape. According to four agency executives who spoke with Digiday, marketers are still working to find a direct link between creator-led campaigns and AI visibility. But correlation is enough reason for brands to be curious. "We are getting that in nearly every pitch we're doing now," said Kristina Coughlin, svp and general manager of Trevant, a performance-based creator marketing agency. Clients are increasingly asking the influencer agency to track whether creator content shows up in AI-powered search results.
Building the creator-AI playbook
Agencies have started adjusting how they discover and vet creators. Trevant begins by auditing a brand's existing creator content to identify which creators and content types are driving the most citations in LLMs, Coughlin said. As campaigns go live, the agency tracks those citations to optimize performance and inform future partnerships. The goal is for AI visibility to sit alongside traditional business metrics like sales, return on ad spend and cost efficiency.
Crispin takes a similar approach, focusing on creators who already rank or get cited in LLM results for client campaigns. The agency's influencer teams manage these efforts with support from SEO teams to reverse engineer the generative engine optimization process, said Freddy Dabaghi, Crispin's chief transformation officer. That reverse engineering has opened doors with clients who were hesitant about influencer marketing but had a strong interest in GEO, he said.
Creators are also adapting. Some are building answer engine optimization websites and conducting AEO audits. Agencies are asking creators to make social captions machine readable with enough context for LLMs to scrape. "In addition to just sharing information and all the usual things that you would have a caption do, we're now suddenly like, 'OK, this is the new long tale of online search, and we need to make sure that this caption is working as hard as possible'," said Danielle Wiley, CEO of influencer marketing shop Sway Group.
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The limits of the strategy
Brands were already using creators as part of earned media strategy to reach people who get news from social feeds. The rise of AI search is accelerating that push. But agency execs warn against going overboard. Some marketers have taken to earning citations via Reddit, though users there remain skeptical, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal.
"If I have 300,000 TikTokkers making content about my new soap, that's not going to get picked up via AEO because it's not in the right spot to get ingested into the AEO engine," said Scott Sutton, CEO at Later, a social media management and influencer marketing platform.
Why this matters for marketing professionals
Marketers who treat AI visibility as an afterthought will watch competitor content answer their customers' questions. The brands that win in chatbot search will be those that identify which creators already influence AI answers in their category, measure those citations alongside standard campaign metrics, and brief creators to produce machine-readable content that LLMs can actually ingest. That's a new skill set for most marketing teams - and one that will separate leaders from laggards as AI search continues to grow.
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