Matteo Ferretti, CEO of PR firm Spynn, stares at his computer screen as he monitors how often his clients’ brands appear in ChatGPT responses, Claude conversations, and Google’s AI overviews.
The responses generated confirm Ferretti’s assumptions that most companies optimized for traditional search engines have become invisible to artificial intelligence.
This digital blindness is one of the most significant changes in marketing since the rise of the Internet. While businesses spent decades perfecting search engine optimization, a new environment emerged almost overnight.
Large language models (LLMs) now mediate billions of searches daily, changing how consumers discover brands. Ferretti and his team stumbled upon this change while pursuing an entirely different goal and inadvertently figured out the solution to the AI invisibility crisis.
Why Traditional SEO Stopped Working Overnight
Traditional search engine optimization built fortunes and destroyed them with equal efficiency. Companies invested millions in keyword strategies, link building, and content optimization designed to meet Google’s algorithms. Yet these carefully crafted approaches prove worthless when artificial intelligence generates responses to queries instead of serving up blue links.
Recent studies indicate that over 60% of searches now receive AI-generated responses. Google’s AI overviews appear for complex queries, while ChatGPT and Claude handle millions of conversational searches daily. These systems do not crawl websites or analyze meta tags because they are designed to synthesize information from authoritative sources to create original responses.
This is bad news for many companies and digital marketers who banked on their SEO strategies. Company websites that dominated search results for years find themselves absent from AI responses. The rules changed completely, and most businesses failed to notice until their website traffic hit an all-time low.
Ferretti foresaw the transition to AI-powered search while analyzing his clients’ performance metrics. “We accidentally discovered that our guaranteed-placement model creates perfect conditions for large language model visibility before anyone understood this was the future of search,” he explains. His company’s approach, securing placements and ensuring clients get featured in Forbes, Bloomberg, and Associated Press, unwittingly aligned with how AI systems evaluated credibility.
What Makes AI Systems Notice Brands
LLMs operate differently from search engines. Rather than ranking individual web pages, they synthesize information from multiple authoritative sources to generate responses. This process requires consistent brand mentions across diverse, credible publications, exactly what Spynn’s guaranteed placement strategy delivers.
The company’s “72-Hour AI-Optimized Publication Package” targets tier-one outlets that artificial intelligence systems prioritize. These publications carry the editorial weight and factual accuracy that language models require when generating responses. Brands that appear consistently across these sources gain recognition in AI-generated content, while those absent from authoritative publications remain invisible.
The discovery led Spynn to consider AI Optimization (AIO) in their PR strategies. Unlike traditional SEO, which focuses on keywords and technical website elements, AIO emphasizes building authority through strategic media placements. The approach requires understanding how LLMs evaluate sources, synthesize information, and determine which brands to include in responses.
Brands using Spynn’s AI-optimized approach report significant increases in ChatGPT mentions and Google AI overview appearances. One client saw their brand mentioned in AI responses increase by 40% within a month of implementing the strategy.
Building Your Business for the AI-First Future
Spynn’s movement toward AI optimization signals the start of a change in the PR industry. The company plans to expand from $12 million to $20 million in annual revenue by positioning itself as one of the first firms to offer an AI-powered brand visibility strategy. This plan targets businesses that know traditional marketing is close to sunsetting.
The company’s medium-term strategy includes opening a regional base in Singapore, Asia’s leading tech hub, for its AI-optimization strategies. The location will serve businesses seeking to improve their visibility across global AI platforms.
Ferretti hopes to transform Spynn in the next five years as the default publicity provider for the post-SEO era. His entrepreneurial prowess tells him that by establishing the firm as the bridge between traditional PR and AI-powered marketing, he can accomplish their future goals and own the AI optimization category in PR.
Ferretti shares that he has already done the first steps through educating and coaching. “AIO is still in the early stages. So, acting now to stay ahead of the game, while everyone else is still trying to figure out what happened, is important. I’ve been educating my team on the transition from keyword-focused strategies to authority-building approaches. These programs teach them how LLMs parse, synthesize, and recommend information,” shares Ferretti.
Ferretti is essentially revising the principles of public relations, but tailoring and adjusting to fit AI into the picture. It is adapting traditional credibility-building techniques for the AI era.
Ferretti’s accidental discovery shows how quickly technology changes business fundamentals. His company’s guaranteed placement model, designed for traditional PR outcomes, became the foundation for AI-age marketing success. For Ferretti, the latest development is proof that businesses must remain flexible enough to capitalize on unexpected technological changes in order to stay afloat.
The AI invisibility crisis affects millions of businesses worldwide. Unfortunately, most remain unaware that their carefully optimized websites and content strategies do not register with artificial intelligence systems. Failing to find solutions to this crisis will leave many businesses in obscurity. Needless to say, the future belongs to brands that understand how artificial intelligence works. This has already been evident when Google’s AI Overview was rolled out, and SEO-optimized websites witnessed a decline in their click-through rates. The question now is, will they adapt to the post-SEO economy, or keep watching their metrics go down?
Read more:
How Spynn is Helping Brands Get Noticed by ChatGPT and Google’s AI
