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Building Brands for Humans and Machines: a new GTM model for a world where AI systems increasingly mediate customer discovery and decision-making
21stCenturyBrand, the brand transformation consultancy, today released a new strategic framework for brand building in the age of AI, underpinned by proprietary data and research from Semrush, an Adobe company, and the leading online visibility management platform.
The paper, Building Brands for Humans and Machines: A New Go-to-Market Model for the AI Era, draws on 18 months of research and analysis by 21stCenturyBrand and Semrush's dataset spanning hundreds of millions of prompts across dozens of categories.
It introduces the Priming and Proving model, 21st Century Brand's proprietary GTM framework for the age of AI; a world in which brands must simultaneously ensure they are understood and evaluated accurately by both humans and machines.
The findings arrive at a decisive moment. With nearly 50% of web users now beginning their searches using AI systems, the paper argues that the customer funnel is no longer a viable planning framework for modern marketers. AI-qualified visitors are already 4.4x more valuable** than traditional search traffic, and the brands capturing that value are those that have built what 21st Century Brand calls Machine-Readable Differentiation: the ability to be understood, trusted and recommended by AI systems, not only humans.
A New CMO Playbook
At the centre of the Priming & Proving model is the simple fact that brand building now has two audiences. Priming is about creating long-term predisposition with humans, building familiarity, cultural relevance and emotional affinity. Proving is about ensuring AI systems can find your brand, understand it correctly, and trust it enough to recommend it. Done well, the two operate as a flywheel, where emotional equity and informational credibility compound over time, each reinforcing each other.
Supporting the framework is a four-lever diagnostic, developed by 21st Century Brand, identifying Coherence, Currency, Authority and Advocacy as the variables with the greatest impact on how brands are found, understood and trusted by AI systems. The paper applies Semrush's AI visibility tracking data to benchmark how brands, including Lego, Shopify, Notion and Patagonia perform across each lever, and what others can learn from their approach.
Critically, the paper argues this is a full company challenge, not a marketing one. Brands whose narrative is misaligned with their product, absent from culture, under-validated by third parties, or disconnected from how customers actually experience them are increasingly exposed, to competitors that are better aligned, and to AI systems that can detect that gap in milliseconds.
Semrush data
New data from Semrush confirms that the signals driving AI recommendations are not new; entity clarity, third-party endorsement and structured content have always underpinned brand authority. What has changed since AI systems were introduced, is the evaluator reading those signals.
The paper includes case studies drawn from some of the world's leading brands, based on Semrush’s extensive AI visibility dataset to define how brands appear across leading AI systems and search environments. The data looks at patterns such as frequency of recommendation, prominence in responses, source authority, sentiment, and consistency of brand association across categories and prompts.
The examples reveal insights from how each performs across the four levers:
- The Lego Group: A monthly AI audience of 1.2 billion across 10,000 live topics. Currency built into the operating model, not the marketing calendar.
- Notion: The connected workspace platform and one of the world’s fastest growing B2B brands receives 96,000 AI mentions per month, reaching 575 million people, with 140% mention growth in the last six months. Coherence driven by a value proposition so aligned with product experience that AI systems describe the brand consistently across 15 countries.
- Shopify: AI mentions up 360% in six months, reaching 1.1 billion, through an authority model spanning more than 119,000 cited pages across developer communities, partner ecosystems and specialist media.
- Patagonia: A global AI visibility score* of 69, sustained over time, with 60.7% of its source mix drawn from community and specialist review environments. Advocacy rooted in values built into the product, not layered on top of it.
The brands winning in AI systems are not doing anything mysterious. They are doing the fundamentals extraordinarily well, treating it as a business priority, not just a marketing or content priority. Clear propositions, consistent signals, credible third-party validation and product experiences people actually want to talk about. What has changed is the scrutiny. AI systems are hyper-rational arbiters that can detect inconsistency or empty claims in milliseconds. That raises the bar for every brand in every category.
Neil Barrie, Founder and CEO, 21stCenturyBrand
The next era of brand visibility will not be won by brands that simply produce more content or chase every new platform. It will be won by brands that are clear, consistent, and credible enough to be understood by both people and AI systems. It means SEO and AI and Agentic Search must be executed in tandem. As discovery becomes more fragmented, marketers need to know not only whether their brand is visible, but how it is being interpreted, compared, and recommended. That is becoming one of the most important growth questions for every modern CMO.
Andrew Warden, VP of Marketing at Adobe and 3X CMO
Availiability
Building Brands for Humans and Machines: A New Go-to-Market Model for the AI Era is available to download here.
