In our latest webinar, The AI Search Revolution: How to keep your content discoverable and trusted, Richard Dixon (Chief Digital Officer at Black Sun Global) was joined by Claire Wilson (Head of Copy and Strategy at Stratton Craig) to explore how AI is reshaping search, digital communication and content strategy - and how organisations can stay visible, authoritative and trusted in an AI‑driven landscape.
As AI shifts how information is found, summarised and consumed, organisations must rethink how they structure, design and measure their digital content. This session provided practical insights into the challenges and opportunities of this new search environment.
AI is rapidly transforming search behaviour. While traditional search impressions continue to grow, click‑through rates are declining as users increasingly rely on AI summaries. When AI provides answers directly, the need to visit the source website drops significantly.
At the same time, organisations are seeing an exponential rise in AI scraping activity, often hundreds of thousands of requests each month, far surpassing the number of actual visits referred from AI tools. This signals a fundamental shift:
Websites are now key content feeders for AI engines, not just destinations for human visitors.
Adding to this, AI‑native browsers and tools such as Atlas, Comet and Gemini’s integrated side‑panel experience enable users to browse and query simultaneously within a single AI interface. This reduces the frequency of direct website visits, even as AI frequently draws from those same sites in the background.
As AI’s influence grows, organisations must ensure their content is recognisable, interpretable and citable by AI systems. This means:
AI search tools follow a multi‑stage process - gathering data, filtering for relevance, and corroborating facts. Content that is well structured, readable and credible is more likely to be surfaced and cited in AI‑generated responses.
This marks the emergence of a dual content model, where websites must:
AI tools extract and recombine content, meaning clarity and context are more important than ever. To ensure information is represented accurately, even when lifted out of its original setting, content should be:
As content production accelerates through AI, organisations risk creating materials that blend into a crowded, repetitive landscape. Distinctiveness now comes from genuine expertise, strong perspectives and original thinking.
Although AI search (GEO) is still evolving, several principles are already emerging:
Answer the right questions
Directly address the key “what, why, how, when and who” questions that users, and AI tools, are looking for. Existing SEO insights remain valuable signals.
Strengthen authority and trust signals
AI looks for evidence. Including accreditations, awards, verified claims and supporting data helps reinforce credibility.
Create FAQ‑style content
This helps AI map your answers to user queries more efficiently, improving the likelihood of being referenced.
Publish genuine thought leadership
Unique insights, proprietary data and focused expertise help differentiate your organisation in a market increasingly populated with generic, AI‑generated content.
Measuring visibility in an AI‑driven environment requires new analytics approaches. Organisations should consider three key areas:
1. AI bot scraping patterns
Tools such as Cloudflare or Akamai reveal:
Some sites now experience significant monthly scraping volumes.
2. AI referrals
Although smaller in volume today, some AI tools do refer users back to websites. These can be tracked within standard analytics platforms.
3. AI performance analysis
This deeper review assesses:
As AI search engines update far more rapidly than traditional search, optimisation changes can take effect within days, making continuous monitoring essential.
Our team helps organisations strengthen their visibility and authority in an AI‑driven search environment, ensuring content is structured, optimised and positioned to perform effectively across emerging AI search tools and engines.
We provide:
AI‑ready content optimisation, including clarity, context and structural enhancements that improve how AI reads and cites your content.
Guidance on GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) to support discoverability across AI assistants and AI‑powered search interfaces.
Technical optimisation, including snippet structure, schema and machine‑readable content layers that help AI interpret your pages correctly.
AI performance analysis, assessing how your content appears within AI responses, which prompts surface your organisation, and how you compare to peers.
AI scraping and analytics monitoring, integrating data from firewalls, AI bot behaviour and web analytics to give a holistic view of visibility and performance.
Strategic recommendations to enhance authority signals, strengthen trustworthiness, and align content with emerging AI search trends.
If you’d like to receive the full webinar recording or discuss how we can help you enhance the AI discoverability of your digital content, please contact:
Abbie Dixon, Relationship Marketing Executive
adixon@blacksun-global.com
About Black Sun
Black Sun Global is a stakeholder advisory and engagement agency that's been driving transformation and positive change for ambitious brands for more than 20 years. With deep expertise in disclosure and reporting, ESG, sustainability, and digital engagement, we reshape how organisations connect with customers, investors, employees, and the wider world.
We are trusted partners to some of the most influential global organisations, sparking innovation and sustainable performance through our strategic insights, partnerships, and proprietary technologies.
As founders of the Positive Change Group, we are on a mission to create a new kind of stakeholder relations partner. Our world-class specialists work closely with executive leadership teams to protect reputations, inspire trust, and promote responsible business practices - building resilience and long-term value in a rapidly changing world.
For more information, please visit: www.blacksun-global.com
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