Building a brand in the artificial intelligence era: Generative engine marketing
Abstract
The rise of large language models (LLMs) is reshaping how brands are discovered, evaluated and purchased, requiring marketers to adapt their strategies for an AI.mediated environment. This paper introduces generative engine marketing (GEM), a systematic framework for ensuring brands are accurately understood and effectively surfaced by AI systems acting as gatekeepers, audiences and buyers. Using the Share of Model platform, the paper analyses how LLMs perceive brands, construct category narratives and determine visibility through new metrics such as mention rate, average position and category associations. Case studies demonstrate meaningful performance gains when LLM.derived insights are applied to media activation and content optimisation. The paper concludes that brands must strategically shape their machine.readable presence to succeed in the emerging ambient era of marketing. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at https://hstalks.com/business/.
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Author's Biography
Jack Smyth is Country Lead for Australia at The Brandtech Group. Brandtech’s companies in Australia include OLIVER, the global leader for in-house agencies; Jellyfish, the progressive digital services company powered by Generative AI, and Mobkoi, transforming mobile ads with innovative creative tech. Jack focuses on how GenAI is changing marketing. From mapping how AI models perceive brands, launching agents to predict social trends and deploying our GenAI creative optimisation platform — Pencil Pro. Before leading the Australia team, he was Chief Solutions Officer at Jellyfish and previously held roles such as Creative Technology Officer at WPP’s Mindshare.
John Dawson is Vice President of Strategy at Jellyfish. Based in the company’s New York office, he brings 15 years of experience working with leading global brands across Australia, Denmark, China and the US. At Jellyfish, John focuses on helping brands thrive in the artificial intelligence era — adapting to new consumer behaviours, unlocking emerging opportunities and building the marketing capabilities needed to drive success.
