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![The role of brand mentions
AI search relies on entity recognition:
numerous, trustworthy brand mentions
are key to building
trust and legitimacy
[brand] + [best ____product/service___]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/affiliatesummitwest-lilyraykeynote-final-260211165852-a5091fc5/85/Affiliate-Summit-West-Lily-Ray-Keynote-2026-49-320.jpg)
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Affiliate Summit West - Lily Ray Keynote 2026
- 1. THE STATE OF SEARCHAND AI IN 2026 L I L Y R A Y
- 2. VP, SEO Strategy& Research Amsive Lily Ray
- 3. The evolution from searchengines to answer engines
- 4. From Search Enginesto Answer Engines AI Overview
- 5. …this is partof a much longer story.
- 6. The Evolution ofGoogle Hummingbird 2014 2015 2017 201 9 2021 2022-2023 2024 From Search Engine to Answer Engine RankBrain Mobile First, Featured Snippets, Transformer BERT MUM & NavBoost Helpful Content Update AI Overviews 2025 AI Mode & Web Guide
- 7. …but that doesn’t meanGoogle wasn’t caught by surprise in 2022
- 8.
- 9. ChatGPT’s Growth 100M Users withintwo months of launch 92% of Fortune 500 companies use ChatGPT 2.5B Prompts sent daily 5th Most visited website in the world 800M Weekly active users by end of 2025
- 10.
- 11. Explosion of NewLLMs & Generative AI Products Large language models Code Assistants Image & video generators & editors Music Generators
- 12. New OpenAI Capabilities MCP (ModelContext Protocol) ChatGPT Apps & Apps SDK Agentic Commerce Protocol
- 13.
- 14. AI Overviews 2B+ Monthly activeusers worldwide 16-25% AIO shown in Google searches (US, Desktop*) 200+ Countries where AI Overviews is live and 40+ languages 10%+ Increase in search volume for queries that generate AIO *SEMRush, 2025
- 15. The reality ofAI assistant market share: - Patrick Stox, Ahrefs
- 16. AI Overviews have begunto appear for more than just ‘informational’ queries
- 17. AI Mode • Googlehas added extensive links and CTAs to use AI Mode (Omnibox, Google App) • 75 million active users in December 2025 • Usage increased by 4x throughout 2025, now over 1% of Google search volume • Best for longer, complex queries • 93% of AI Mode searches are zero click
- 18. Web Guide • AI-poweredreorganization of the SERP • Uses query fan-out to run multiple searches and cluster search results by intent • Potential “future of search”
- 19. Google’s New AI Products Gemini3 Nano Banana Google Antigravity Project Astra Veo Flow Gemma Project Mariner NotebookLM LearnLM AI Mode Alphafold
- 20.
- 21.
- 22. Google vs. ChatGPT Usage: ChatGPTusers haven’t abandoned Google
- 23.
- 24. Google Sues SerpAPI, whichpowers multiple LLMs & scrapers
- 25.
- 26.
- 27. THE AI ”CODERED” REVERSAL THE TABLES TURNED ‘Google’s management has reportedly issued a ’code red’ amid rising popularity of the ChatGPT AI’ ‘OpenAI CEO Declared ‘Code Red’ to Combat Threats to ChatGPT, Delays Ads Effort’ 2022 2025
- 28. Our zero clickfuture… how to adapt?
- 29. New metrics forAI search (AEO/GEO) 01 02 03 04 05 Brand mentions AI search citations Brand salience Share of search Brand sentiment Brand visibility
- 30. The tools & workflows have evolved LLMvisibility monitoring tools Query fan-out & chunk extraction Log file analysis Rank tracking tools (SEMrush, Ahrefs, Similarweb) now show AI search visibility.
- 31. New AI search tracking tools Add atleast one to your arsenal of tools
- 32. Multi modal Multi channel AI search is multi-modal TE X T I M AG E S A U D I O V I D E O AI SEARCH
- 33. The role ofsocial & 3rd party mentions Third-Party Mentions Listicles & Review Sites Entity Validation & Trust Social Media UGC highly cited Recency & authenticity Traditional SEO: Backlinks & Clicks AI Search (AEO): Citations & Brand Mentions
- 34. AI search isbecoming increasingly personalized Personalization User A Search User B Search
- 35. Big questions for publishers& affiliate sites
- 36. How do Iprotect and license my IP?
- 37. Should I allowmy content to be used in training data and/or live retrieval? To block content from Google/Open AI: To block content from Google AI Overviews: User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: / User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Disallow: / User-agent: Google-Extended Disallow: / <meta name=“robots” content=“nosnippet”>
- 38. Can my publicationnegotiate a deal with OpenAI or Google? OpenAI Data Partnerships Licensing Fees Google News Initiative Cash grants and/or monthly fees
- 39. What is my“human-centric” competitive advantage?
- 40. How do Idefine “winning” without clicks?
- 41. How do Ifuture-proof my revenue model?
- 42. Cloudfare: new productsto manage AI crawling for publishers AI CRAWL CONTROL PAY-PER- CRAWL MARKETPLACE CONTENT SIGNALS POLICY & CREDENTIALING MANAGED ROBOTS.TXT
- 43. The most citedpages in AI search come from affiliate & product review sites
- 44. Tips for AISearch Visibility
- 45. SEO is thefoundation for AI search visibility.
- 46. Retrieval- augmented generation (RAG) User asks question Process1 If using RAG, checks search results & synthesizes answer Process 3 LLM determines whether to use RAG or training data Process 2
- 47. Visit our brandedquestion checklist
- 48. Build & enhancepages for E-E-A-T & AI Search visibility
- 49. The role ofbrand mentions AI search relies on entity recognition: numerous, trustworthy brand mentions are key to building trust and legitimacy [brand] + [best ____product/service___]
- 50.
- 51. Leverage YouTube forupper- funnel, educational information h/t Ethan Smith @ Graphite
- 52. Cross-platform amplification ORIGINAL CONTENT SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS & OPINIONPIECES ON UGC SITES CONFERENCE PRESENTATION S & SLIDE DECKS VISUAL REFERENCES & INFOGRAPHIC S REDDIT & FORUM CONTRIBUTIONS PODCASTS & INTERVIEWS VIDEOS & SHORT VIDEOS/REELS
- 53. What about affiliatesites? 31K keywords in positions 1-3 (Ahrefs) 2.2k keywords in Google AI Overviews FITNESS REVIEW SITE Reviewed by professional trainers Original photography Robust review methodology Videos of review process First-person opinions & insights
- 54.
Editor's Notes
- #6 Over the last decade, Google shifted from keyword matching to a deep understanding of human intent, Hummingbird and RankBrain taught the engine to recognize 'entities' rather than just strings of text. By 2017, Google researchers invented the Transformer architecture – brain for modern AI which they used to launch BERT in 2019 to master sentence context and MUM in 2021 to handle complex, multimodal tasks However, while Google focused on perfecting search rankings, many of its key Transformer architects moved to OpenAI to apply that same technology to generative conversation, eventually launching ChatGPT Now: moved past blue links into the era of AI Overviews, where the search engine has officially become a proactive answer engine
- #8 Closest other code red – company-wide mandate in 2011 – social circle / facebook
- #9 ChatGPT is officially the fastest-growing startup in history, reaching 100 million users in just two months and scaling to nearly a billion weekly actives in record time. 100M users - It took TikTok nine months to reach this milestone and Instagram two and a half years.
- #10 473 million worldwide active users per month
- #11 OpenAI’s infrastructure (APIs and reasoning models) enables the functionality of some of the tools in the other three columns. Most of these apps became successful due to ChatGPT’s success. Coding tools: These are largely built directly on top of the models that power ChatGPT (GPT-4o, o1). While some of these tools are directly powered by OpenAI’s engines, others leverage the same foundational 'Transformer’ (the T in chatgpt) architecture to translate human prompts into high-quality creative output."
- #12 MCP: A standardized way for ChatGPT to "plug into" a company's live data (CRM, Slack, Google Drive, or SQL databases) without custom API work for every integration. SDK: This allows developers to build full applications with interactive UIs that live inside the ChatGPT window ACP: A protocol (developed with Stripe) that enables "Instant Checkout." It allows AI agents to securely handle payments, shipping info, and merchant negotiations.
- #15 AI Overviews technically has 2.1 billion MAUs, compared to ChatGPT 1 billion MAUs But ChatGPT needs to win every visit
- #19 Google has moved beyond providing simple 'answers' to building a complete world of AI Agents that can act on your behalf Google’s strategic investment in next-generation AI is anchored by the Gemini 3 architecture, which powers a diverse ecosystem of specialized tools ranging from the Veo 3 video engine to the Antigravity agentic coding platform. By integrating these advanced models into consumer and enterprise products like Flow and Project Mariner, Google is shifting from simple generative assistants to autonomous "AI agents" capable of executing complex, multi-step tasks across the web.
- #24 In December 2025, Google launched a major legal offensive by suing SerpApi, a prominent scraping service that many AI companies, including OpenAI, reportedly use to bypass Google's restrictions and feed real-time search data into their models. Google is effectively attempting to shut down the back door OpenAI uses to maintain the accuracy of ChatGPT’s current events.
- #25 The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is an open standard designed for the future of commerce, empowering you to turn AI interactions into instant sales. Adopt UCP to enable agentic actions on Google AI Mode and Gemini, starting with direct buying.
- #26 1.3 billion iphone users worldwide 130 million in US grants Gemini native access to over two billion active devices and effectively neutralizes OpenAI’s attempt to dominate the mobile AI layer. By becoming the core "reasoning engine" for the Apple ecosystem, Google moves from a defensive position to a distribution powerhouse, forcing OpenAI to rely on its standalone app rather than deep system integration.
- #27 December 2025 OpenAI declared a "code red" in late 2025 to shift the company's focus toward improving the speed, reliability, and personalization of ChatGPT following intense competitive pressure from Google’s Gemini 3.
- #34 Challenges for tracking tools
- #42 AI Crawl Control: A dashboard to identify AI bots and manage them with one click—allowing, blocking, or monitoring their access. Pay-per-Crawl Marketplace: A tool that forces AI companies to pay a fee before they can scrape your content for training. Content Signals Policy & Credentialing: A set of digital labels that tell AI models exactly how they can use your data (e.g., "Search only, no training") Managed Robots.txt: An automated file that Cloudflare updates in real-time to block new AI scrapers as they emerge, removing the need for manual updates. Improves performance & load times.
- #43 Negotiate "Fixed-Fee" Citation Placements: As brands realize that AI models cite you to form their "opinions," your site becomes a PR asset. You can charge brands a premium or a flat monthly fee to ensure they are featured in the "Top 3" of your reviews, specifically because that inclusion increases their "Share of Voice" in AI responses. Pay-Per-Citation Agreements: Some advanced affiliate programs are moving toward a model where you are paid when your content is cited by an AI engine for a specific high-value prompt, even if the user doesn't click through immediately. Must label sponsored content