Brands that are accurately interpreted by machines will be most valued: Mark Szulc, Adobe

The fundamental tenet of internet marketing for almost two decades has been that success was correlated with visibility. The brands that mastered metadata, backlinks, and keywords became victorious in the competition for consumers' attention. However, that equation is being revised in 2025. But today, discovery no longer begins with a search bar, it begins with a prompt. Consumers no longer scroll through ten blue links; they receive synthesized, conversational answers from generative AI systems. The linear search process has given way to an interpretative one, in which algorithms create meaning rather than merely retrieving data.

That subtle but seismic behavioral shift has transformed the idea of visibility itself. As Mark Szulc, Principal Product Manager & Regional Evangelist, APAC, Adobe, observes, “Marketers are struggling to understand how they’re showing up in these new spaces. The consumer’s first impression is now mediated through AI and not the homepage.”

Enter Adobe’s LLM Optimizer, a tool designed to help brands navigate this new reality where being “discoverable” means being recognized, cited, and accurately represented within AI-generated content.

The Collapse of the Blue Link Era

Search once rewarded the best-optimized websites. Today, AI rewards the best-understood ideas.

Users are now recipients of conclusions rather than page-by-page explorers.  And that change has a significant impact on how brands show up in the contemporary digital environment, or don't.

“It’s a fundamental change in behavior,” Szulc explains. “The question isn’t ‘where do I rank?’ anymore. It’s ‘am I mentioned at all? And if I am, does that mention trace back to me?’”

Performance measurement is redefined for this era by the LLM Optimizer.  It finds content gaps, records brand mentions and citations across AI-generated outputs, and offers prescriptive recommendations on everything from new topics to cover to how to reinforce or shape external references.

“It’s not about auditing your content,” says Szulc. “It’s about understanding how the machine perceives your brand and then guiding that perception with intent.”

From SEO to AEO: The Rise of Agentic Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) taught marketers to optimize for algorithms. The next era demands optimizing for agents, intelligent systems that infer, synthesize, and respond dynamically.

This emerging discipline is what Szulc calls Agentic Engine Optimization (AEO) which is rooted in semantics, authority, and narrative clarity. Unlike traditional search engines, LLMs don’t rely on rigid keyword structures; they draw from patterns of trust and expertise embedded in content.

“AI models are selective,” Szulc notes. “They elevate what feels informed, recent, and credible. You can’t buy visibility anymore. It has to earn comprehension.”

Adobe’s internal experiments confirmed this shift. One of its top-performing assets wasn’t a web page at all, but a research PDF. “Humans barely found it,” Szulc laughs. “But AI systems surfaced constantly because they were rich, detailed, and authoritative.”

If SEO was about being findable, AEO is about being explainable. And that difference is where the future of content strategy now lies.

Beyond Analytics: Turning Visibility Into Intelligence

Adobe’s LLM Optimizer isn’t just an analytics platform; it’s a decision framework. Built for enterprise-scale complexity, it integrates with existing workflows to align teams around a single question: how do we ensure AI understands us correctly?

“Enterprise marketing isn’t about one campaign or one website,” Szulc explains. “It’s about orchestrating a consistent narrative across hundreds of touchpoints, markets, and content types.”

The Optimizer translates this complexity into actionable intelligence. It identifies where a brand is underrepresented in AI summaries, flags what content needs reinforcement, and connects visibility metrics directly to content strategy.

Traditional SEO tools reported what happened. Adobe’s system predicts what needs to happen next.

Competing in a Rewired Attention Economy

Bain & Company says that four out of five consumers already rely on AI-generated results for half of their inquiries, while Gartner predicts a 50% drop in organic search traffic by 2028.  The change is fundamental rather than speculative.

But Szulc cautions against interpreting it as decline. “It’s not the death of search,” he says. “It’s the evolution of discovery. Your owned assets still matter but now, they inform both human readers and machine interpreters.”

The definition of competition is also changing. Brands are now competing not just with competitors in their industry but also with any entity that commands attention in AI-generated contexts, such as community threads or influencers.

“The real challenge is not who you compete against, but what you’re competing for is a share of semantic attention,” Szulc adds.

The Acceleration Imperative

As AI reshapes the rhythm of marketing, speed becomes strategy. The content cycles that once spanned quarters now unfold in days.

“We used to refresh our sites annually,” Szulc notes. “Now, you need to monitor insights, act on them, and adapt continuously. The brands that can learn and pivot in real time will define this next phase.”

Adobe’s own approach mirrors this philosophy of releasing iterative updates, refining AI detection models, and expanding the LLM Optimizer globally. The underlying message is clear: adaptation is not a project; it’s an operating model.

The Future: From Being Seen to Being Understood

Understanding, not visibility, is the key to succeed in this new ecosystem.  Brands that can be accurately interpreted by machines and meaningfully represented in conversational circumstances will be the most valued.

“The digital conversation is no longer happening around your brand,” Szulc concludes. “It’s happening through your brand in how AI systems describe you, summarize you, and cite you.”

In other words, discovery has shifted from search to synthesis. And in that world, the brands that thrive won’t just show up in answers but they’ll become part of them.

Because in the age of intelligent engines, to be understood is to exist.