Consistency is the Key to Growth for AI Enhanced Search

If the advent of AI has done anything for marketers, it’s reminded them of the critical role consistency plays in growing your reach, impact, and recognition as a brand. Consistency means many things in marketing, but for brands looking to grow today while preparing for a potentially agentic future, there are 2 critical areas of consistency that brands need to review.

1. Consistency in availability
2. Consistency in applicability
3. The future has not been written...
4. About Herd

1. Consistency in availability

It should be no surprise that, just like Google search, probabilistic engines like ChatGPT and AI recommendation engines are built to prefer certainty and consensus over discord and uncertainty.

If you were in the right place at the right time (the Digital PR Summit 2026) you may have caught me talking at length about this. To summarise a brand is shaped as much by the audience’s consensus around its value, function, and meaning as it is by the business it represents.

The most effective means of growing a brand is to maximise and amplify agreement between your owned outputs and your public representation.

Brands can harness this by leveraging social listening, aggregating review inputs, and analysing press sentiment and themes. Mirroring the themes that match your brand’s strengths and value-add maximises the impact of your activity because it is already supported by a wealth of press, social, and user-generated proof.

If your individual marketing campaigns, public perception, and off-site proof all speak to different themes, you’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back. Instead of helping search engines amplify a known-good solution, you’re undermining their confidence in who your brand is, and where you’re most helpful for their users.

To grow in AI search, your brand needs to have identifiable and consistency its positioning, messaging, and reputation across content you control, and content that you don’t.

2. Consistency in applicability

The internet is a messy, complex place. The volume of data and documents available is staggering, making the challenge facing systems like search engines and AI assistants trying to make sense of it.

Google became particularly successful in encouraging webmasters to make their content easier to understand. Think back to Rich Snippets – these rewarded brands that produced easily parsed answers to common queries. Rich results in search? A reward given to webmasters who marked up their (semi) unstructured data to make it easier for Google to catalogue.

More recently, Google Search Console is offering webmasters a trade: let Google use content to train and enhance AI generated features or opt out of traffic and visibility in AI search.

These controls aren’t available for all webmasters yet, but they speak to Google’s ongoing direction of travel. Whether in traditional search, or AI discovery, Google’s systems reward domains that enable their systems to provide the best possible user experience.

As such, it’s well worth keeping abreast of developments in AI and agentic user experiences. While Shopify already ensures universal availability of their merchants’ catalogues in AI search (via a direct integration of Shopify’s catalogue with Gemini, Copilot, and ChatGPT), the wider internet remains difficult to engage with as an AI platform.

Gianluca Fiorelli recently published a breakdown of the fascinating future of online content that may soon be the reality for brands. Ensuring teams understand the uses and value for Schema, WebMCP, the Universal Commerce Protocol, and accessible semantic html will give brands a headstart as AI search continues to evolve.

To summarise, understanding where and how your brand might be interacted with online, and ensuring your platform supports Google’s search and AI platforms will supercharge growth for brands that are ready and willing to invest in the required code revisions and infrastructure.

In the interim, brands will do well to review:

• Is structured data used to make it clear what your content’s value and function to users is?

• Check that your html is well structured, ideally semantic (why use a <div> when <nav> is right there?!), and accessible for screen-readers & AI agents.

• Give buttons, links, images, and controls human-readable and informative labels.

• Make sure forms and other functional elements are properly marked-up so it’s clear what content and interactions are expected, and how agents may need to populate them.

• Is your site the victim of high cumulative layout shift? Do you have large interstitials? Stop controls moving during loading and exclude AI agents and crawlers from seeing the interstitial so vision models don’t get lost.

• Is your site content rendering quickly, and ideally without expensive JS? Get as much important content into the html response as possible or prerender as much as you can, especially if you’re relying heavily on hydration and client-side code to layout and render the page.

• Check your product feeds and platform integrations; feeding data directly through a structured feed minimises the need for interpretation, expensive content rendering, and allows brands to keep platforms continuously updated on product availability and suitability.

3. The future has not been written…

Google is aware of peoples’ continuous need for answers, options, and solutions – this is likely the rationale behind the Universal Cart. Google intends to offer a continuous discovery and commerce experience for users across every Google surface.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean users, or more importantly most users, will follow suit. Just as OpenAI launched, then walked back, agentic commerce last year, there’s no guarantee that Universal Cart and agentic commerce will be a hit on the first attempt.

It doesn’t matter whether users embrace or reject the agentic web in the next 12 months. What’s important is that ambitious brands are ready to adapt – whether that means adjusting your tech stack or expanding your investment in email, social, or above the line marketing.

First move advantage can be very real in eCommerce, but with AI search contributing only a small percentage of revenue for brands today the focus will always be on growing reach and impact where our customers are ready to be reached.

4. About Herd

Based in Hessle, East Yorkshire, Herd specialises in performance marketing and Shopify development. We combine our expertise across each area to deliver solutions that are ambitious and impactful.

We’ve earned Shopify Premier Partner status and driven growth, over the last decade, for various ambitious global brands, executing data-led bespoke strategies.

Our performance marketing team features vastly experienced and talented experts across SEO, paid media, content, and digital PR.