How to build brands that both humans and machines can trust

Over to our esteemed experts from The Drum’s member community.

Lexi Coulter, director of account activation, Mediasmith: Brand is 100% back. A June 2025 study by Semrush found that almost half (40%) of all cited sources for ChatGPT came from Reddit, with Wikipedia and YouTube following behind, all ahead of Google at 23%. Because of this, brands will absolutely have to focus more on brand-building tactics to influence mindshare in these organic communities: notably the Reddits and YouTubes of the world. With 60% of Searches now ending in zero clicks, the traditional bottom-funnel playbook is losing its potency. Brands absolutely have to start thinking more holistically about brand equity, resonance and marketplace lift to ensure that they are remaining competitive.

Elliot Ward, founder and managing director, Excite: If sales stop the minute your ads do, you’ve built a funnel, not a business. That’s the problem for a lot of brands right now: they’re overpaying to acquire and then reacquire the same customers. Performance marketing works, but only in the short term. Brand is what builds the long term. It’s what protects your value, sharpens your positioning, and builds real competitive distance. Just look at how OOH is growing; it’s being driven by brand. Marketers want to build real-world connections that last, not just another campaign that disappears in a scroll. Out-of-home earns attention, builds credibility, and makes people feel something tangible. Brand isn’t back, but it should be.

Sophie Coley, director of strategy, Propellernet: Whether it’s back or never left, brand is as messy as ever in 2025. LLMs clearly favor brands that are already well known and trusted, just as Google always has, even if it’s never said so outright. The problem is, visibility within LLMs is almost impossible to track, despite a wave of tools claiming to do so. That makes it very difficult to prove commercial value. Clients are seeking AI support because it’s new and shiny, but what they’re really chasing hasn’t changed. It’s authority, relevance, trust and visibility, just in a new space. The silver lining is that brand investment still lifts everything else. Stronger brands earn higher click-through rates, convert more efficiently and need less budget to compete at the bottom of the funnel. So while the platforms might have changed, the belief in brand value without perfect attribution is as important – and as difficult – as ever.

Conor Bant, head of media & performance, Fox Agency: It’s hardly the case that there’s been a miraculous discovery of brand’s value. The big shift toward digital demand gen and huge syndication budgets lasted for some time after the pandemic, but it feels as if brand is fighting back. It’s becoming harder to be found, so brands need to be present and visible to drive inbound engagement. The growth of programmatic media buying has increased the volume and quality of datasets. Advertisers are now equipped to deliver brand campaigns both technically and commercially. The barriers to entry for audio and Connected TV advertising have been reduced, with these platforms going no-license fee and charging for media only. And with the targeting available, these memorable, engaging formats are being delivered to the right people. Less wastage, more adoption. Most importantly, conversions, various attribution analytics models, and account measurement platforms will show the impact of brand on your KPIs.

Kristina Angelova, partner, Rika Digital: Many marketing professionals have spent the last decade focusing on impressions or chasing clicks and volume, forgetting that Brand is the engine behind long-term growth. A lot can be said about why this is happening, but, luckily, Brand is rightly reclaiming its central role in marketing. GenAI has rewritten the rules, however, and AI-driven discovery is collapsing the funnel. Consumers may ask, compare and decide, all in one session, often without ever visiting a brand’s website (a great amount of research is emerging on quantifying zero-click engagement). Half of UK consumers (~17 million people) already use AI tools to find and evaluate products and more will follow during the upcoming peak season. The Brand fundamentals (authority, distinctiveness, brand code consistency, persistent visibility) still hold true, but now need to exist in data, not just in design. Marketing teams should think like system architects, ensuring that content, assets and signals are structured and interpretable both by humans and by machines (great new buzzword/phrase). It’s important to note that the opinion that AIs form about a brand doesn’t always mirror consumer sentiment or past success in social and search. Credible citations, customer reviews and third-party validation carry disproportionate weight. Once that perception forms within an LLM, it’s hard to shift (until a model update). It’s often beyond a brand’s control, even. Investment in GEO (another great new buzzword) helps, but the results are not as imminent as companies may wish. In many ways, I expect to see a return to what PR was good at, before it became synonymous with influencer brokerage and after it was all about crisis management. In short, consistency and persistent storytelling will once again sit at the core of Brand and great campaigns will need to be built on that foundation. Performance will function as an ‘always-on’ system, continually reinforcing the signals that make brands both discoverable and believable.

Henry McIntosh, founder, 2112 Marketing: For those of us marketing within and to complex sectors like pharma and financial services, the importance of brand never went away – it’s the key catalyst for commercial growth. In these markets, people still buy people. Relationships, reputation, and credibility determine whether your message lands. Traditional brand-building tactics such as live events (whether you’re attending, speaking, or hosting) remain critical to building trusted connections at the top of the funnel. Without a strong, distinctive brand, performance marketing underperforms. The most successful organizations invest deeply in their positioning, immersing themselves in the buying centers of their ideal clients to shape propositions, campaigns, and strategies that resonate, nurture, and educate. It’s this clarity and authenticity that fuel long-term traction. The best organizations realize that it is not only their corporate brand that is important, the image of their senior team is crucial too – hence why Silicon Valley is scrambling to hire Heads of CEO Content. In 2026, the winners won’t be those chasing clicks – they’ll be the ones whose brands are recognized, respected, and remembered by the audiences that matter most.

Tash Carlisle, senior brand media manager, Connective3: Brand isn’t ‘back.’ It never left. Since AI is quickly leveling the playing field, brands are quickly realizing the importance of leaning into consumer connection and quality to cut through. We know that people choose to buy emotionally, and Brand Media is your secret weapon to stand out and be price resistant in a commoditized market. We’ve entered the new era of ‘Compound Branding.’ You need to hit that sweet spot – balancing cultural relevance alongside consistently gaining authentic, relevant attention to achieve exponential growth. That means ditching the old model of one massive annual TV ad and instead leaning into a high-touchpoint omnichannel presence. It’s about ‘lots of littles’ working together, not one ‘big push.’ Ditch the silos and focus on implementing a cohesive brand bedia strategy that ensures you’re visible early in the purchase cycle. Success hinges on simultaneously establishing authority and maximizing visibility. This means the need for high volume diverse, quality creative (using AI for efficiency, not ‘AI slop’). Pair this with the right creator voices and you’ve got the recipe for genuine, scaled reach, engagement and efficiency to successfully unlock brand growth.

Laura Jones, CEO, BAV Group: In an agentic world, a brand’s importance isn’t diminished; it’s amplified. Building brand is still a non-negotiable, but how marketers go about it will need to evolve. Now that AI has become yet another gatekeeper of discovery and decision-making, marketers must now treat it as another stakeholder in a brand’s positioning and measurement. For human audiences, brand still anchors meaning, emotion, and identity. But for agents, brand equity will be encoded as quantifiable metrics: reliability, performance, ethical consistency, and verified data. The challenge ahead is to create brands that help humans feel more connected, and to also create trusted connections with the intelligence systems that will increasingly be making decisions on our behalf.

Louise Ali, digital PR business director, PrettyGreen: Trust is the key to future success. What makes a great brand hasn’t changed, but how brands are trusted and discovered absolutely has. As AI reshapes how people and machines find information, online visibility now depends on credibility. That credibility is built through authority-driven Digital PR, consistent storytelling and authentic human connection. These are the signals that LLMs increasingly recognize and are looking out for. In 2025, the smartest brands are connecting PR with performance. It’s not about throwing budget at the funnel; it’s about feeding it with trust. The same fundamentals still matter, but marketers must now consider how they signal expertise, experience, authority and trust, not just for audiences, but for algorithms that prioritize credible citations and authentic social conversations. To get this right, brands must blend creativity with data intelligence to earn attention that feels human, not forced. Because, whether it’s a journalist, a consumer or ChatGPT, they’ll only recommend what they have reason to trust.

Paul Hewerdine, VP, strategy (EMEA), Transmission: Make the list. Make the cut. Make the choice. That’s what matters in B2B. And if you’re a known, trusted and recommended brand, you’re stacking the odds in your favor. All LLMs and AI-search summaries have brought are yet more, albeit increasingly influential, places your brand needs to show up. These tools are using authority signals from other online sources – reviews, forums, communities, rankings, news and industry sites – to feed their answers. They just trust third-party content more than they trust your own site. So, want to build your brand for the AI era? Create genuinely PR-worthy thought leadership; use media partnerships and influencers to amplify your reach; be the most helpful brand in your category, empowering and educating buyers; own the topical issues that are shaping boardroom agendas; get ranked, rated and recommended. Yes, optimize for GEO, but optimize your brand to very much win hearts and minds too.

Julia Zimmermann, executive partner, Future Marketing (part of Serviceplan Group): In recent years, performance was considered religion. Data the gospel. And brand? Dismissed as unmeasurable, long-term fluff. But in 2025, AI rewrites the doctrine. Algorithms no longer reward spend – they reward meaning. The brands that win are those LLMs can trust and recommend. The old brand principles – authority, distinctiveness, coherence, visibility – still matter, and build the basis. But they’ve evolved into semantic clarity, meaning clear and machine-readable communication; algorithmic authority, a trusted digital reputation; attention quality, valuing depth over reach; and ethical consistency, authentic and responsible behavior that builds lasting trust. Together, they define the new algorithmic advantage – the bridge between human emotion and machine logic. Strong brand foundations now fuel performance, enabling algorithms to recognize relevance and reliability. In short: In the zero-click world, brand is not decoration; it is the operating system of trust.

Ric Rodriguez, director of strategy, Found: AI has completely changed the consumer journey. People can move from awareness to conversion within a few questions and receive personalized decisions, not just opinions. Showing up – even when you’re paying for it – is not a guarantee. Media owners are investing across new products and infrastructure to protect experience – by fitting people to ads, not the other way around. While this may make ads more impactful, it fundamentally changes how we reach people. Within AI-led interfaces, the lines between sponsored and organic are blurry and difficult to measure objectively. Marketers will need to make every interaction count, even if they can’t predict how, when and where that interaction will happen. The one constant? Brand – and digital advertising is fast becoming a vehicle to build real, impactful mental availability – even in an AI world. Those who lean into this shift will build new and deeper relationships with their audience.

Bradley Keefer, CRO, Keen Decision Systems: Performance marketing has become all the rage, with advertisers putting more dollars into campaigns where they can better understand the effectiveness of their ad spend. However, overemphasizing performance ads over brand marketing can lead to cracks in marketing initiatives. When it comes to attracting customers and generating revenue, marketers must focus on both. Our model has found that brand investment also compounds performance across the entire marketing ecosystem. From improving paid media efficiency to accelerating sales velocity, a healthy brand amplifies every downstream dollar. Marketers need to find the right balance between top and bottom funnel tactics, identifying the right mix for their business objectives.

Kathryn Ellis, group strategy director, Audience Collective: At the IPA Effectiveness Conference, I was equally terrified and inspired by Jellyfish’s Tom Roach and Vaseline’s Nathalia Amadeu. Their talk, Lots of Littles, revealed how AI and native content demands have turbocharged our already cluttered digital media space. The algorithm’s appetite is insatiable. Their solution? Use AI to generate hundreds of variations or tap into creators and audiences for “fit for platform” UGC. In this sea of sameness, only strong brands will surface. The authority and appeal of a brand matter more than ever. 45% of campaign effectiveness comes from creative synergy across channels. Brands must speak coherently about their relative difference and reinforce our distinctive assets in every execution, across the funnel. As we create more content for more touchpoints, we risk becoming wallpaper. For challengers who cannot outspend, bringing everything back to the brand is the smartest way to win. Every little thing we do must be magic.

Lucy Hart, executive strategy director, The Romans: It used to be billboards and column inches, but now the new brand battleground is taking place in ChatGPT. With AI-powered search now the public’s preferred source of information (44%), appearing in AI results is all-important for marketers. Editorial is playing a major part in helping brands win in GEO, with AI citing articles from media in at least one in five searches. The Romans, the global award-winning creative agency, has just launched Serpent, a GEO analysis tool that breaks down search results from Google & ChatGPT into actionable insights.

It guides users through the sources AI relies on, what it values, decodes what content ranks highly and recommends which journalists to pitch and which angles to pursue and then can ideate against what it has discovered to come up with editorial story angles and campaign ideas. Serpent’s mantra, ‘once we pitched editors, now we pitch the algorithm,’ is a call to arms to think about AI as an ‘audience’ with its own content requirements that the PR industry can service.

Ben Jaffé, chief strategy officer, FCB London: If we accept that brands are just a set of associations in people’s heads, then we need to accept that marketing is as much about curation as it is creation. After a period where those associations have been sullied by a slew of price-driven, rational and “performance” communications, we now have empirical evidence that brand growth depends on positively reinforcing the most attractive, distinctive, and emotionally resonant associations with a brand. Think of it as curatorial investment that compounds in value over time. Each campaign and touchpoint should strengthen and refine the brand’s most valuable associations, not scatter or dilute them. With the rise of LLMs, this matters more than ever. As people increasingly turn to LLMs for information and recommendations, brands have to earn a positive ‘share of model’ to get positive share of mind. But we can’t just pollute channels with content designed for algorithms. We still need to remember our ultimate audience: people. The brands that win will use AI as a curatorial partner, rather than an additional target audience.