There's a gap opening up between two kinds of search visibility, and most brands only have one of them.
The first is classic SEO: ranking on Google's ten blue links, showing up in Maps, appearing in shopping results. Most established brands have invested in this for years and have a reasonable handle on it.
The second is answer-engine visibility — whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Google's AI Overviews mention your brand when someone asks a relevant question. This is a completely different game, and a huge number of otherwise-strong brands score close to zero on it.
The gap exists because AI answer engines don't rank pages the way Google does. They synthesize an answer from sources they trust, and they tend to trust content that is clearly structured, clearly authored, directly answers a specific question, and is corroborated across multiple credible sources.
A page built purely to rank on Google — heavy on keywords, light on directly answering the question a real person would ask — often performs poorly here, even if it ranks on page one.
How to check where you stand: ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overview the exact questions a prospective customer would ask about your category, without mentioning your brand name. If you don't appear, that's the gap.
Closing it isn't about abandoning SEO — it's about adding a second layer: structured data (schema markup), clearly-authored expert content, and direct-answer formatting alongside the SEO work you're already doing.