When CNN filed legal action against AI firm Perplexity, coverage focused on the copyright implications with Perplexity allegedly unlawfully distributing CNN’s copyrighted content without permission in their LLM’s responses.
The case is highlights how AI visibility is not just an SEO issue, but a licensing one too. If the courts rule that uncompensated web scraping is illegal, visibility in AI search could become a dominated by brands with the ability to strike content partnerships and licensing deals.
AI doesn’t just create content from thin air. It needs sources. So when access to these sources are potentially changing from one day to the next, it raises potential issues.
For those of us working in digital marketing, this case raises issues that aren’t about this specific case, but on how we plan around AI as part of our content strategy. We’ve spoken to a lot of channel businesses that are shifting their focus towards ‘ranking in AI’ as the next evolution of SEO. But this can’t be done in isolation and needs to be part of a wider strategy.
Chasing AI visibility is the wrong race
When Google introduced its AI overviews, brands rushed to try and secure this new ‘position zero’ in the rankings. Now the priority is ranking in LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity. This instinct isn’t the problem, it’s the assumption that AI visibility is a separate goal.
So, you want your brand to show up in AI search, where do you start?
AI can’t make up new information about your brand. It draws on existing content from websites, published articles, third-party commentary and reviews. What appears in AI summaries entirely depends on how strong this content is.
So, that means to start ranking in AI results, you need to have a content strategy that puts the information you want out there first and foremost. If you think that sounds an awful lot like what you need for an effective SEO strategy, you’d be correct. It’s all about producing high quality content. And if there’s a landmark legal case that changes how AI is allowed to source content, then your hard work won’t have gone to waste.
Risks of treating AI visibility as a standalone goal
Pressure on brands to rank in searches is nothing new. With AI generated answers now thrown into the mix, it’s understandable that some brands feel they have to focus on achieving this marker.
Short-term tactics we’re seeing include publishing high volumes of thin, keyword-heavy content designed to match likely AI queries, creating generic ‘expert commentary’ pages with no authorship or depth, chasing backlinks in any publication regardless of editorial credibility or relevance and optimising content structure for machines at the expense of clarity for human readers.
These aren’t new mistakes, they’re very similar to the old SEO shortcuts we used to see. But, AI systems don’t just index content, they interpret and summarise it. Weak or repetitive material
will actively dilute how a brand is represented. This is where getting a brand strategy right becomes even more important.
Why consistency matters more than ever
Brands that perform consistently well in AI-generated results tend have one thing in common – their positioning is clear, coherent and repeated across every channel. Website content, PR coverage, social presence and sales messaging all maintaining the same tone helps build the authority that AI looks for and reduces the ambiguity that it doesn’t like.
AI systems are interpreting a brand from multiple sources simultaneously, so if messaging varies too much, the system is left to merge conflicting signals, resulting in diluted or an inaccurate representation.
Brands with a good content strategy, clear SEO, consistent messaging and PR coverage will not only be more accurately represented in AI systems but they’re more resilient in the event of change. If AI is forced to change how it sources information, brands that have multiple channels reinforcing the same story will be less exposed to any single point of failure.
What good AI visibility actually looks like in practice
Strong AI visibility in practice looks like strong marketing done properly.
It means positioning a brand in a way that is specific enough to be understood and consistent enough to be repeated. Google has recently published it’s own AI visibility checker within Search Console, and their advice is to focus on the same strategies they recommend for SEO. Keep publishing consistently insightful content, prioritising readability, and structuring your web content to effectively guide users where they want to go. If your ideal customer finds it useful, there’s a really good chance an AI will see it as useful too.
For brands asking ‘how do we rank in AI?,’ in many cases they’re asking the wrong question. What they should be asking is ‘is our brand clearly understood, consistently communicated and credible enough to surface accurately?’
If the answer to that is yes then AI visibility will be a lot less hard work. If the answer is no, then no amount of AI-specific optimisation will fix it. And, as more people swtich to using AI search, Google recently revealed that 68% of searches now end without a site being clicked on, you run the risk of being left behind.
The CNN/Perplexity case is one indication among many that AI search is still finding its footing. But the core principles on getting found online still apply. Those have always been the foundations of good marketing and remain so now.