Written by Jocelyn Lovelle

Three weeks ago, Google announced the biggest upgrade to its search in 25 years.

Gemini, Google’s AI model, is now at the forefront of delivering Google search results to users. As you’ve likely experienced, Google search is now multilayered and dynamic, with the ability to expand results as you dive deeper into your query topic. 

Utilizing its foundational search (index, ranking system, knowledge graph) Google is rolling out delivery of nuanced, interactive search results instead of the traditional 10 blue links. 

The Gemini platform will do many other things, though for the moment it stops short of doing your laundry. However, it can create custom tools for organizing your grocery list, your workouts, or your family’s schedule. It now has agentic features for some users that can gather information around the clock in the background and report back on your favorite artist, the moment their new album drops, and the latest news in your professional sector. Coming this summer, you’ll be able to create, “Custom generative UI, including visual tools and simulations, tailored precisely to your needs,” according to Elizabeth Reid, Google’s VP and Head of Search. Many users can already connect Google apps like email and photos to Gemini for customized search so it understands, “your personal context.”

That’s the whole picture, but for now, we’ll focus on the piece of this announcement that means something big for your business. 

If your website is not optimized for AI parsing (including Gemini, Chat, Claude and Perplexity) the AI will struggle to understand what you do, who you help, and therefore why it should recommend your business in AI-powered search results. 

Your website is not the only place you need to optimize for AI, but it’s the starting point. 

How do we see this development at Root + River?

We see an opportunity. 

Just because AI is here doesn’t mean we don’t still need humans to write. We do, and AI needs humans too – because only you can tell your stories. Those who choose to use AI to write for them lose their unique voice to an amalgamation of all voices. 

The more we lean into helping AI understand what we do, what our brands stand for, and how we are positioned to help, the more AI can choose our businesses to surface in search results. 

AI is search

Just one year after its debut, AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch. 

People are embracing this new way of expanded, intuitive search, and that means, with the right language (it will always come down to language and we love this), you can optimize your website in more dynamic and powerful ways than were possible with legacy SEO and keyword search strategies.

Here’s why. 

The way AI parses your website is through understanding a knowledge map, not just keywords. It wants to understand what you do, why you do it, how you do it, and who you do it for, so it can serve up the best possible answers to search queries. 

This doesn’t mean changing everything on your website, unless your website isn’t a unique reflection of what matters most to you and your business — if that’s the case, come talk to us; we can help. But if your website already has authentic language that resonates with the people you most want to help and who most need what you do, the new AI search means updating how you use that language to make the relationships between your philosophies, expertise, experience, and solutions more explicit.

Your website needs to help AI understand the relationship between the same things your audience wants to know: what you believe, why you believe it, how the work you do creates unique outcomes and what those outcomes are. 

Maps not keywords

The old SEO question: What keywords are most important to my brand so it gets seen by search? 

The new AI question: What concepts do I want AI to associate with my brand, and what is the relationship between those concepts?

This shift is where we see the big opportunity for brands and the new AI search.

We all used to continually search for and update the keywords that defined our work. We were limited to snippets, sound bites and the same limited phrases everyone else was using. But now we have much more latitude, and our goal is now to ask ourselves the question, “Am I helping AI understand my ideas, my IP, in relation to other ideas.” We still need keywords and key phrases that describe what we do, but now we get to use them in a much more fluid way.

In order for AI to understand how your brand fits into the larger picture of your profession, it needs to understand relationally what beliefs shape your approach, what philosophies support that approach and what you disagree with in the larger world that informs your methods. 

AI is dependent on you connecting your IP, strategies and solutions on all of your website’s pages, so it can form a knowledge map of what your brand is, who it helps and how it creates success, so it can best serve the search question it’s been asked. 

This isn’t any different from what Root + River has been guiding leaders towards for over a decade now. Brands are built on beliefs. Humans innately resonate with that fact and AI search doesn’t change it. For the better, AI supports it and requires us to make the relationship between our beliefs and how we serve our clients clear and explicit.

To that end, we’ve created the AI Discovery Framework, an extension of our philosophy of intrinsic branding. Just as intrinsic branding gives you language that is rich, accurate and meaningful and resonant, the AI Discovery Framework helps you create a structure of that language – and the relationships between the ideas it expresses – so AI can understand it and connect your brand to the people who need it most.

• Beliefs:
  • What core concepts and IP do you most want AI (and humans) to associate with your brand?
    
• Beliefs become concepts:
  • What do these beliefs mean out in the world, for your profession as a whole and for individual professionals in your industry? 
  • What ideas support your beliefs? 
  • What ideas run counter to your beliefs? 
  • How do your beliefs create solutions?
    
• Concepts become methodologies and offerings:
  • How do your beliefs and concepts play out in practice? How do they inform the way you work, your unique processes and your specific services?
    
• Offerings create outcomes:
  • How does your work solve problems and change people or organizations?
    
• Relationships and repetition:
  • This set of connections: Beliefs>concepts>methodologies>outcomes needs to be repeated across the pages of your website and in your blog posts. 

Once you’ve answered these questions, those answers, in the language of your brand voice, need to be woven into all the pages of your site so AI can understand their relationality.

Your brand is still an expression of your soul, even to AI

Gemini uses a four-point process for parsing your content: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (EEAT). Other AI systems use a similar approach, though EEAT was created for and by Google.

Experience: 

AI needs to see you’ve actually done the work. Share how many people you’ve worked with, the projects you’ve completed and the problems you’ve helped solve.

Expertise: 

Show AI you understand your work and how it relates to the larger world. Share your observations, strategies, lessons, and insights from the work you’ve done.

Authority:
Others recognize you for your work. You’re a guest on blogs or podcasts and/or you speak about your work for groups or other organizations. You are cited in others’ work or have a method, framework, or ideology others attribute to you. Share these on a page on your website.

Trustworthiness:
Your work and claims are believable and verifiable. Use testimonials and case studies, data, examples, and personal stories to back up your data. 

As you work through the AI Discovery Framework, keep in mind EEAT to ensure your language structure gives AI what it needs to understand your work holistically, the relationship between the how, what, why, who, and the results of what you do.

The beauty of this is in the alignment of what AI is looking for and what we’ve been telling our clients long before AI was in play — mission-driven leaders and organizations succeed when they create evocative messaging and craft enduring brand strategies that inspire and energize humans. 

AI needs explicit, clearly articulated beliefs, processes, and outcomes. The organizations most likely to succeed in AI search are those that know what they believe, can express those beliefs consistently, and have built their brand from the inside out.

Your brand is an expression of your soul, of how you do what you do in the world in a way that is different from anyone and everyone else. When you can articulate that uniqueness with language that comes from your heart, you are talking directly to the people who want what you do, and they can feel it. 

It may sound crazy, but this is exactly what AI is looking for, because, after all, AI is serving up answers to questions only humans can pose. 

Explore the Ideas Behind This Article

Intrinsic branding

Intrinsic branding is the practice of organizing and expressing your brand around your mission, beliefs and culture.

Warning Label

Our Warning Label is a practical example of belief-based branding in action. It clearly articulates, in our voice and language, what we believe and what we don’t, helping humans and AI understand who we serve and why. 

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