Transcript
Hi, I’m Lydia, a Digital Marketing Manager here at BDB, and today I’m going to be talking about AI discoverability.
The rise of AI and changes in traditional search behaviour is where AI discoverability comes in.
As of February 2025, ChatGPT has surpassed 400 million weekly active users, and it’s estimated that around 9 in 10 B2B buyers have adopted GenAI. So, it’s becoming more and more important for businesses to understand when and why they’re appearing in AI responses.
When we say AI responses, we’re referring to both the responses within LLMs like ChatGPT and also Google AI Overviews.
How do AI tools choose what content to show?
AI Overviews typically appear at the top of Google’s search engine results page — otherwise known as the SERP — and these kinds of conversational summaries pull information from different sources. It’s said that if your website ranks in position one in Google (so in the traditional results, your blue links), you have a 25% chance of being used as a source in these AI Overviews.
Your traditional blue link position really plays a part in how likely you are to be featured in an AI Overview.
Then you have your LLMs. Profound reported that ChatGPT and Google deliver vastly different search results, with only an 8 to 12% overlap in the results, as they retrieve information differently. Likewise, different LLMs also retrieve information differently. When you search for something in ChatGPT, for example, it’s unlikely that the results will be the same when you search the same query within Perplexity.
There are nuances between the different LLMs as well. This is why it’s important to know where your audience is searching, what they are searching for within these AI-powered tools and what factors influence LLM sources that appear in their responses.
What is BDB’s approach to AI discoverability?
At BDB, we consider AI as a strategic layer throughout our organic search processes to continuously grow visibility.
We believe that the fundamentals of great content haven’t changed. When it comes to AI discoverability, it’s still about deeply understanding your customer and solving their challenges — and that remains at its core. What is evolving is how we plan, structure and optimise content to ensure that it performs in both human and AI discovery environments. We know search behaviour is changing, and more and more people are using AI-powered tools to find content.
Now we need to understand how we measure how discoverable you are in these AI environments. For this, there are a few things that we do:
The first is monitoring market share, brand sentiment and consumer engagement trends across LLMs.
We also review competitive brand perception across the likes of ChatGPT and Perplexity, understand topic distribution across different LLMs and analyse query themes to really help us understand the intent behind a search.
These areas — alongside reverse engineering AI results — facilitate the research stage of our AI discoverability approach.
It helps us to understand content preferences and identify potential gaps in your content strategy.
At BDB, we combine human creativity with AI scaling capabilities to future-proof your content strategy for these evolving search experiences and to deliver organic growth for a human and AI world.
If you’d like to find out more, please get in touch with us at BDB Global.
