Well over a century since it was first conceived, the concept of the marketing funnel is a remarkable survivor in a sector where everything changes so quickly.
But in the age of AI and LLMs, it is time for brands to swap funnel vision for tunnel vision, as Anna Rashid, Tangerine's chief digital innovation officer, told PR360 this month.
In her keynote presentation, Rashid highlighted the urgency of understanding both changes in consumer behaviour and how to ensure they “equip the machines” with what they need, so that your brand shows up in AI search results.
As Rashid noted, half of all Google searches now return an AI-generated summary. By 2028, that figure will be 75%. Already, three-quarters of adults are relying on those summaries, and ‘cognitive surrender’ – the phenomenon of people asking AI rather than doing their own thinking – is becoming the norm.
The classic consideration set, in which consumers weigh three or four options before making a decision, is shrinking rapidly. Increasingly, consumers immediately opt for the one option which AI helps them identify as the best. The funnel is dead: long live the tunnel. Get yourself into the narrow mouth of that tunnel and you’re winning. Stats show that when a brand is retrieved and recommended by AI, it converts at 23 times the rate of organic Google traffic.
“Advertising dominance is declining,” Rashid told the PR360 audience, “and part of the reason for that is because AI retrieves and selects what is going to be most interesting to people. And what’s most interesting to people is the stuff that earned campaigns do.”
“You used to be able to secure visibility,” she said. “Now you have to earn attention.”
This distinction is key. “Visible does not mean retrievable,” she emphasised. Just because you’re putting a lot of content out there, or spending a lot of money on advertising, it doesn’t mean the LLMs will care.
Some major, global brands are essentially “invisible” because they’re not showing up in AI results, she argued. “They’re becoming invisible,” she explained, “because of the signals they send.” Or more pertinently, the signals they aren’t sending.
To help brands avoid this LLM oblivion, Tangerine has developed Retriva, a tool used across the agency to analyse and understand the impact of the signals a brand is sending.
“This is how we take the handcuffs off earned,” she explained, adding that earned must no longer be considered “the poor relation to advertising”, saying: “It [earned] does not deserve less budget. It deserves more.”
There are four principles underpinning Retriva and Tangerine’s signal
campaigns:
-
Semantic richness
This starts with how your content is built. How are you putting your keywords in context? Where’s your citable data, your citable evidence? How are you building expertise, authority and trust?
For Rashid, the answer to these questions must start with a “rich, bold idea that acts as a central
theme”, supported by strong assets, expert voices and hard evidence.
-
Balance across the ecosystem
LLMs draw on consensus, so the breadth of a brand’s presence matters as much as its depth – across social, reviews, news coverage and search.
Where there are gaps, earned should lead but not go it alone. “Bring on a partner, bring on an
influencer, work with the complementary disciplines and work them hard,” Rashid explained. “Make the work work
harder.”
-
Trust building
LLMs don’t fact-check – they look for consensus. If something appears frequently enough across the web, an LLM will cite it as fact, whether it’s accurate or not.
Brands need to get ahead of this by actively building a high-quality consensus around themselves:
content that is recommended, reviewed and trusted. “Draw consensus with quality information that has high sentiment,
that people trust, that is recommended and reviewed,” Rashid urged.
-
Signal recharge
“When you get a citation in an LLM, it will decay [ie disappear] really quickly,” warned Rashid. “If you overlay that with complementary signals – sentiment, reviews, endorsement and expert comment – you will significantly slow that decay. And then you can recharge it.”
Visibility, in other words, is not a one-time achievement. It requires ongoing investment in the right signals.
These investments also involve a shift in thinking. As a marcomms professional, your job is no longer “to persuade the customer”, Rashid argued. Instead, it is “to equip the machine to do the persuading for us”.
Fortunately for earned media and PR specialists, they already have the skills to do that persuading, she argued, adding: “We just need to supercharge them.”
The stakes are high. According to a PwC report cited by Rashid, 74% of the economic value of AI is captured by the 20% of brands that are most retrievable.
For those outside that group, the outlook is stark: “If you aren’t retrievable, you just won’t exist.”
For more information on The Retrievability Revolution, get in touch with Tangerine today to request the latest whitepaper and learn more about its tool, Retriva, here: Retriva - Tangerine.