Your Website Isn’t the Destination — It's The Source

AI demands a new marketing playbook.

The search landscape has changed more in the past 24 months than it did in the prior two decades. As large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude reshape how consumers discover brands, marketing teams are waking up to an uncomfortable reality: their traditional SEO playbook is becoming obsolete.

According to HubSpot's 2025 State of Marketing Report, 35% of marketers now say their customers go to AI tools first to search for products, services, or answers—and that number is expected to surpass 50% by 2026. Yet, less than 5% of brands have taken steps to optimize for these tools. The disconnect is real.

At Captiva, we're not just watching this shift—we're taking action. Our mission is simple: help forward-thinking marketers earn their place in the age of AI-driven discovery. That means reframing SEO as more than just a race to the top of Google. It's about being referenceable, retrievable, and trusted by artifical intelligence.

What Happens When Someone "prompts" AI?

Most marketers still think of search as a list of ranked links. But when a user prompts ChatGPT with a question, there’s no results page, no blue links. There is a single answer.

That answer isn’t pulled from a database of pages. It’s generated using a mixture of what the model has been trained on historically and what it can scrape from the web in a brief test-time compute window. If your brand isn't included in the training data, or if it's not structured in a way that can be interpreted confidently by the model, you won't be cited in that critical, split-second decision.

This is a massive change in the typical buyer journey online. LLMs are making buying decisions for users, and if they aren't mentioning you, you'll start losing business.

Traditional SEO vs. LLM Optimization:

The first thing to know: traditional SEO isn’t dead. But it's no longer sufficient.

Traditional SEO Focuses On:

• Keyword targeting
• Backlink building
• Website traffic
• Meta Descriptions
• etc.

LLM Optimization Focuses On:

• Structured data (schema, entity tagging)
• Content clarity and machine interpretability
• Semantic consistency across your digital footprint
• Signals and prompt answers from trusted data sources

While SEO tries to convince Google to rank your site, LLM optimization is all about teaching a machine to actually understand and recall your brand. It’s a shift from ranking to relevance. From page one to prompt one.

Marketing's Blind Spot: Where Brands Lose

Marketers today spend billions on SEO. According to Semrush, $68B is spent on the service each year globally and 60% of companies plan to increase budgets this year. But what good is content if AI isn't reading it?

We’ve audited dozens of fast-growing brands and found that even those with stellar SEO, high domain authority, and strong backlinks still fail basic visibility tests in LLMs.

Here’s what we commonly see:

• Websites with no .txt or schema markup available for AI to analyze
• Inconsistent messaging between site, press, and business listings
• No brand reinforcement to satisfy top prompts across LLMs
• Over-reliance on keywords with zero semantic context

LLMs aren’t looking for keywords. They’re looking for meaning. And most marketing teams aren’t (or don't know how to start) measuring this. We do.

SEO Strategy from the Ground Up

Captiva was built to address this gap between traditional content strategies and LLM-based discovery. Our team doesn’t just simply run a report and hand you the results. We turn every insight into action—working as a partner with you to refine your strategy, tune technical signals, and track improvements until your brand dominates AI search.

Our platform helps you:

• Implement semantic labeling across product and content pages
• Rewrite and structure content to align with AI model parsing
• Monitor real-time visibility performance in LLM environments
• Run prompt tests to validate brand recall and discoverability

This isn’t SEO—this is a brand new category: AI Search Optimization.

A Wake-Up Call for CMOs

If you’re a marketing leader still measuring success in Google SERP rankings and click-through rates alone, you’re missing where the market is going. AI is increasingly the first touchpoint, the new homepage, the gatekeeper of your brand.

The Future Belongs to Optimized Brands

Marketers who win will be those who adapt now—not when traffic starts mysteriously dropping, not when ChatGPT becomes the one and only stop in your customer’s journey.

Want to See How AI Sees You?

Book a 15-minute AI Visibility Review. We’ll walk you through your report, run a live prompt test, and show you exactly where your brand stands in the new world of search.

Get Your Free Captiva Report ➔