How brands can stay visible in the era of fragmented search.
I sat down with Maneesha Bhangle, our Senior PR Manager, to discuss fragmented search: what is means, how it affects brands, and how they can remain visible in a world where the starting point is no longer well defined.
Q: Let’s start with a bit of background. What changes have you seen to the PR and marketing landscape over the years?
I’m a Senior PR and marketing strategist with over a decade of experience across global brands and SMEs. Over the past few years, a major focus has been the growing intersection between PR, content, SEO, and what we now call Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). More and more, we’ve found brands need our help to stay visible across AI tools like Google’s AI Summary, ChatGPT, perplexity and more.
I’m particularly interested in how search behaviour is evolving and what that means for brand authority, reputation, and long-term visibility.
Q: Can you give the audience at home a quick overview of fragmented search? What does it mean?
People no longer rely on Google as the single default starting point for finding information. Instead, discovery is happening across multiple platforms depending on intent.
Someone might search TikTok for restaurant recommendations, Reddit for honest opinions, YouTube for tutorials, and various LLM’s (language learning models) such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Google AI Overviews for quick summaries, product comparisons or more complex queries. For example: “Find me a vegan restaurant near Tower Bridge”, or “What are the best fans on the market? Compare them for me, listing the pros and cons”.
Rather than one dominant search journey, we now have lots of smaller discovery journeys happening simultaneously, across different ecosystems.
Q: What’s changed exactly? How is it different from standard search?
Traditional search was relatively predictable. A user typed in keywords, Google returned a list of links, and brands competed for clicks. Now, the discovery and decision-making process is far more fragmented, conversational, and intent-led. Natural language and authoritative long-form explainer content have become increasingly important.
The biggest shift is that users are no longer just searching with keywords, especially when it comes to LLMs. They are asking multiple conversational questions, expecting instant answers, and moving between platforms before making decisions. AI tools can summarise information without the need to click on another site. Social platforms surface content based on behaviour and interest, and community platforms shape trust through real conversations rather than polished brand messaging.
The key difference is that brands are no longer just competing for rankings. They are competing to be referenced, recommended, summarised and accurately understood by entirely different systems, each using its own signals and algorithms.
That means the challenge is not simply being found, but ensuring AI and other discovery platforms have the right, current understanding of who you are, what you do, and why you are credible.
Q: What challenges has this brought with it? What benefits?
The biggest challenge is visibility and understanding where your brand is actually being discovered.
A business might rank well on Google but still be largely invisible in AI-generated answers, social search, or community-led platforms like Reddit. Discovery journeys are also far less linear now. Someone might spot your brand on TikTok, validate it through Reddit, ask ChatGPT for
comparisons, then convert days later through a direct visit or branded search. That makes attribution much harder and means traditional analytics often only tell part of the story.
Another challenge is that each platform behaves differently. What works for Google won’t necessarily work for TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, and AI search tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity – each interprets, surfaces, and summarises information in slightly different ways.
Brands need platform-specific strategies, but these all still need to be aligned to an overarching, clear business objective to work well together.
Thankfully, there are major opportunities too. Brands that build genuine authority, trusted content, and strong third-party visibility now have more opportunities than ever to be discovered across multiple ecosystems, not just traditional search.
Generative Engine Optimisation is shifting the focus toward trust, expertise, and consistency rather than purely technical SEO tactics.
Q: Are PR & Content strategically positioned to win in this environment?
PR has always been about building trust, authority, and third-party credibility, which are exactly the signals this new discovery landscape values.
AI models don’t just look at what a brand says about itself. They synthesise information from multiple sources, which means third-party corroboration becomes increasingly important. Trusted media coverage, expert commentary, credible citations, customer sentiment, and consistent brand information across different platforms all help validate what a brand is known for.
That is where PR and content become strategically powerful, creating authoritative, citable trust signals that both humans and AI tools can recognise as trustworthy.
In a GEO context, the goal is not just to publish content, but to make your brand part of the answer. PR also helps brands move beyond owned content into earned influence, which matters even more as search engines increasingly summarise information rather than simply send traffic to websites.
Strong content & PR help brands build digital authority that travels across search engines, AI tools, and social discovery. This shift arguably makes them among the most commercially strategic disciplines in modern marketing.
Q: What’s a clear takeaway for marketing leaders and brands?
Stop thinking about visibility purely as ranking on Google. Instead, ask: where does our audience actually go to discover, validate, and trust information?
Modern visibility means being discoverable, credible, and trusted across the places your audience searches, whether that is traditional search, AI tools, social platforms, or community forums.
This space is also changing quickly. AI platforms are evolving constantly, and LLM providers are in an ongoing race to improve how they source, summarise, and recommend information. What works today may look different in six months time.
The brands that win will be those that stay adaptable, monitor changing behaviours, and build authority across the wider digital ecosystem, not just those focused on traditional search rankings.
