As AI becomes the gatekeeper of discovery and commerce, a new framework urges marketers to think beyond human audiences.
Brands that fail to adapt their marketing strategies for the age of artificial intelligence risk being passed over entirely — not by consumers, but by the AI systems increasingly making decisions on their behalf.
That is the central warning of a new report from digital marketing agency Jellyfish, Brands in the AI Era: Generative Engine Marketing, which argues that large language models have become powerful intermediaries between products and the people who buy them.
The report introduces a framework called Generative Engine Marketing, or GEM, which it positions as a systematic approach to ensuring brands are accurately represented and reliably surfaced by AI systems — whether those systems are recommending a product, answering a question, or completing a purchase autonomously.
“Brands have historically been made by people, for people,” said John Dawson, Vice President of Strategy at Jellyfish and a co-author of the report. “Now, AI is an actor in the system: watching, recommending, choosing, and even purchasing.”
The framework builds on Jellyfish’s proprietary Share of Model platform, which analyses how leading language models perceive a given brand, and combines it with a continuous cycle of technical optimization, content strategy, testing and measurement. The goal, the report states, is to make brand assets legible to models and resonant to human audiences simultaneously.
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The report’s early results are striking. Gentle Monster, the South Korean eyewear brand, used LLM-driven insights to optimize its Google Performance Max campaigns ahead of the US holiday season, achieving a 17 percent improvement in click-through rate, a 14 percent lift in conversion rate and a 39 percent gain in return on ad spend. Industrial supplier MSC Industrial reported a 45 percent revenue increase in the first 30 days after implementing AI-driven campaign optimizations, with an incremental return on ad spend of 758 percent.
Dawson acknowledged that the industry has weathered major technological shifts before — the rise of digital, social media and mobile — but argued this moment is categorically different. For the first time, he said, brands must cultivate relationships not only with consumers but with the models that mediate their choices.
“GEM reframes this challenge as an opportunity,” he said, “to design brands that are legible to machines, resonant to humans, and optimized for both.”