For over a decade, agencies have trained their clients and stakeholders to equate traffic and rankings with SEO success. But AI search has fundamentally changed how discovery works. 

The nature of this shift is a big reminder to CMOs, marketers and SEOs that higher rankings and increased traffic are just tactics. While they contribute to a genuine business outcome, they’re not outcomes in themselves. 

The real objective is brand visibility; ensuring your brand is in front of the right audience with the right message at the right time (the moments when buyers form their opinions of your brand). This takes strategy, not just tactics; a critical distinction often missing from SEO conversations. 

Mistaking tactics for strategy 

Your SEO team might be highly active; optimising content, tweaking code, building links, and chasing keywords. But is your brand building a sustained and well-defined advantage? Can you measure consistent progress towards a clearly defined business objective? 

Confusing tactics with strategy is like confusing movement with momentum. Your various activities and tactics are the movement, which can be in any direction. Strategy focuses all your efforts in one direction, so that the cumulative force creates momentum. 

In SEO, the difference between movement and momentum is everything. While a tactic might generate a spike in one or two metrics, it’s entirely possible that two or more tactics might inadvertently create movement in different directions, effectively pulling against each other. Progress is harder, results are smaller, and the benefits evaporate sooner. 

But with a concerted, ongoing strategy, the various tactics are selected and executed for how they support and amplify each other.  

Unfortunately, most SEO work is almost entirely about movement. Your team can be extraordinarily busy and productive, ticking every box on the to-do list, and still not generate enough momentum to stay ahead of competitors. 

The problem isn’t the competence of your team. They’re no doubt working hard, still doing the same job as always. It’s just that many SEO professionals are trained and conditioned to approach SEO as a series of deliverables, backed by standardised methodologies and repeatable processes.  

They’re brilliant at executing tactics targeting search engines, but brand visibility has become so much more than that. The frameworks and methodologies they use are increasingly out of step with how customers research and discover things today. While they’re keeping your rankings high in Google, your brand might be completely invisible in ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. 

Without a proper visibility strategy, all those SEO tactics risk generating lots of activity without any real momentum towards a meaningful objective.   

From movement to momentum 

While SEO is a channel strategy focused on search engines, a visibility strategy encompasses all the surfaces where your audience discovers, researches and evaluates brands and products. Organic search sits alongside AI search, video platforms, forums, and more. 

As search behaviour evolves and traffic from search continues to decline, a visibility strategy becomes even more essential. It’s about ensuring audiences come across your brand, and your ideal messaging, wherever and however they do their research, even if that doesn’t result in immediate traffic. 

For now, a brand’s visibility in AI-generated answers is largely driven by chance. Brands that already had high visibility and momentum in search before AI existed may find some of that has crossed over into AI.  

But relying on chance isn’t a strategy. Any momentum a brand may have will soon drop off as more competitors start experimenting with ways to increase their own visibility in AI search.  

Your SEO team can’t solve this alone. A visibility strategy requires cross-channel thinking, informed by market dynamics, customer journey mapping, and an understanding of how various channels work together. There are also decisions to be made around competitive positioning, business alignment, and resource allocation across multiple discovery surfaces. All these skills and decisions sit at the marketing leadership level. Your SEO team can provide data and expertise to inform these decisions, but the responsibility is still yours as CMO.   

Until now, the familiar old tactics, with their focus on rankings and traffic, made ROI easier to calculate and forecast. The same isn’t true for all areas of a visibility strategy; especially AI search, which is still so relatively new that there’s very little in the way of data analytics. Even the experts are still figuring things out as they go.  

This means adopting a different mindset; one that can make some execs and CMOs uncomfortable. You need to be comfortable investing in experimentation, particularly when it comes to your brand’s visibility in AI-generated answers.  

Achieving and maintaining momentum will require a concerted and systematic effort to understand how AI search works.    

I don’t mean ‘work’ in the sense of how LLMs function, such as the technical and algorithmic factors that might determine whether they cite your content in AI-generated responses. That’s still very much a tactical mindset.      

I mean how AI search shapes consumer behaviours and vice versa. How are your customers using these tools? Understanding how AI search impacts your customer journey will require analysis. 

Applying the 4D framework to visibility strategy 

Analysis is one thing. Two common challenges with many strategies are:  

  • Translating your findings and insights into actionable workflows, and; 
  • Maintaining the necessary long-term strategic vision in the face of daily short-term pressures and shifting priorities. 

Overcoming these challenges may require you to adopt a clear framework before, to structure your efforts and keep your teams aligned.  

The 4D framework describes four repeatable steps, each named with a word beginning with D, presumably for easy recall. In fact, there are a few versions of the 4D framework out there, each adopting a different set of D-words according to the industry and the process being described  

Alliteration aside, it’s a useful approach to help you and your team turn strategic thinking into tactical execution, while still having the flexibility to adapt as platforms and priorities evolve. 

My preferred version is as follows: 

Define: state your objectives 

Start by clearly articulating the problem you’re solving and the goals you’re pursuing. Your goal can’t be something arbitrary, like increasing organic traffic by 30%. Instead, define your objectives in relation to genuine business outcomes. To do this, you’ll need plenty of background data to provide the necessary context. Your goals need to reflect the available market headroom and competitive reality, not wishful thinking. 

Design: develop your strategic approach 

With clear objectives in place, you then need to decide how best to achieve them. Identify every surface used by your audience to discover, research, compare, and evaluate brands and products. For each one, assess conversation volume, commercial intent, competitor presence, your current visibility, and the effort required to win. Look for gaps your strategy will need to address, such as issues with how LLMs currently describe and position your offerings, or relevant queries where your brand is not currently cited (especially if your competitors are).  

These gaps represent your “must win” opportunities, requiring strategies that are not only highly actionable but also achievable. Therefore, be ruthless about prioritising opportunities according to the potential impact and business value, balanced against the likely cost, effort, and time to results. 

Deliver: Implement and monitor 

This is where strategy meets execution. If you’ve involved the team throughout the process so far, they should be aware of the background and the reasons for each decision. Otherwise, they might implement the necessary tactics according to the same old frameworks and practices, without aligning them with your wider strategy. 

Once implemented, constant monitoring is crucial because platforms evolve rapidly. ChatGPT-5.0 behaves differently to -4.5. Meanwhile, Google releases several core updates each year with no set cadence, alongside continuous smaller, unannounced changes. This makes it virtually impossible to predict when changes might occur to Google’s AI Overviews. Plus, AI Overviews and AI Mode are both partially shaped by personalisation, meaning two people might see different recommendations for the same query. 

Therefore, what worked last quarter might not work this quarter. Your team needs the authority to adjust or pivot tactics as required, as well as resources to experiment with emerging channels.  

Devote: Ensure long-term success 

Strategy isn’t set-and-forget. It isn’t a one-time exercise. Devote time to monitoring results and fine-tuning operations on a regular cadence. You’ll also need to manage stakeholder expectations, particularly with your board, with ongoing education about why visibility without immediate clickable traffic still delivers business value. Review your visibility strategy quarterly. What has changed? Have new platforms emerged that deserve attention? Has the competitive landscape shifted? This ongoing commitment helps you to maintain your momentum, instead of gradually slowing due to friction from new factors you haven’t accounted for. 

Spelled out like this, the 4D framework might seem obvious, but it’s a way to think systematically about your visibility strategy. Plenty of strategies fail because they don’t adequately define the outcome or come unstuck during implementation. 

Your team can execute the tactics, but you need to drive the strategic discipline that turns their execution into genuine business momentum. 

The key to a successful visibility strategy 

While many areas of your visibility strategy will still draw on established marketing tactics and metrics, there is currently no best practice formula or framework for visibility in AI. Anyone promising that they have somehow cracked the code is selling snake oil. Your SEO team is working in an environment where the rules are still being written.   

Successful companies will be those willing to experiment; constantly adapting their approach to find what works for them.  

But experimentation takes resources, and time. More importantly, it also requires permission to fail, because some experiments absolutely will. And if results take time to materialise, they need to know you’ll provide the necessary air cover should senior management start getting nervous. 

Your SEO team is still capable of executing at a high level. But without clear strategic direction from the CMO level, they’re working with one hand tied behind their backs.   

With a CMO-led visibility strategy, you stand a much greater chance of unlocking the full potential of your team’s hard-won expertise. 

Need help developing your visibility strategy? Get in touch to learn how SALT can help.