AI Is Already Driving Real Purchases. Here Is What Your Business Should Do About It

A Five-Step Framework: What to Do Now

Based on our work with clients across B2B and B2C verticals and on consumer data showing how AI influences decisions, here is how we approach AI visibility strategy at Triangle Direct Media. These are the same steps we work through with clients every week.

1. Audit your current AI presence before doing anything else

   Open ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Type in the questions your customers actually ask, not branded queries, but the category-level questions they use before they know who to hire or buy from. Does your brand appear? How is it described? Is that description accurate, specific, and favorable? This baseline assessment costs nothing and reveals everything. Most businesses have never done it, which means they are making strategic decisions without knowing the starting point.

2. Build content that answers specific questions with specific answers

   AI systems synthesize responses from what exists on the web. If your website, your published coverage, and your review footprint offer precise, well-structured information about what you do and for whom, that content has a higher probability of being cited. The survey found that 52 percent of consumers specify constraints upfront, such as budget, required features, compatibility, and use case.¹ Vague, marketing-inflected descriptions do not survive that kind of query. Detailed, specific answers do. Our content marketing services are built around exactly this kind of structured, query-driven content development.

3. Treat SEO and AI optimization as reinforcing strategies, not competing ones

   Seventy-seven percent of consumers use both channels in the same journey.¹ High-quality, authoritative content that earns strong organic search rankings tends to be the same content that AI systems draw upon when constructing responses. The signals that indicate authority and relevance to Google’s depth of coverage, structured data, earned backlinks and consistent entity coverage are the same signals that make content more likely to appear in AI responses. Your SEO strategy is not separate from your AI visibility strategy. It is the foundation of it.

4. Strengthen every verification touchpoint—not just the first impression

   Eighty-six percent of consumers verify AI brand recommendations before purchasing.¹ That means an AI mention is not a sale; it is an invitation to scrutiny. Your Google Business profile, your third-party review presence, your website’s credibility signals, and your brand’s footprint in trade publications and local press all need to hold up to inspection. An AI mention that leads a prospective customer to a weak or inconsistent verification experience does not just miss a conversion; it actively damages your brand’s standing. Our reputation management services focus specifically on this verification layer, because it is where many brands lose customers they were on the verge of earning.

5. Track AI-influenced traffic as its own channel

   AI-influenced traffic is measurable. UTM parameters on links cited in AI responses, changes in branded and near-brand search volume over time, and direct navigation patterns in your analytics can all be correlated with fluctuations in AI visibility. If you are not measuring it, you cannot improve it systematically or demonstrate its value to the rest of your organization. Our team can help you build a tracking framework as part of a broader integrated digital marketing strategy that treats AI visibility as a first-class channel, not a footnote.

The Bottom Line, Across Both Parts

The Semrush consumer survey does what good research is supposed to do: it replaces speculation with data. AI tools are embedded in the modern buyer journey at every stage, across every category, for consumers of every demographic profile. Fifty percent have already purchased something after AI-assisted research. Sixty-nine percent expect to lean on AI even more heavily going forward.

What the data does not change is the underlying principle that has guided effective digital marketing for two decades: customers reward businesses that show up with the right information, in the right place, at the right moment in their decision process. AI has added new surfaces where that principle applies. The execution demands have shifted. The principle has not.

If you are uncertain where your brand currently stands in AI search responses or how to improve that standing without abandoning the SEO and content investments that still matter, we would be glad to have that conversation. Reach out to the Triangle Direct Media team for a no-obligation assessment of your current digital visibility across both traditional and AI search.

• • ← Read Part 1: The Consumer Behavior Data
  • Read the original Semrush study →