See What’s Helping (Or Hurting) Your Traditional and AI Search Performance in 2025

Brands are at a crossroads right now:

• 94% of customers look beyond major search engines to learn about brands and services

• 45% of customers use AI tools to research before making buying decisions

Yes, Google still matters — a lot. But if AI can't find you? Your customers can't either. Some brands are already evolving past traditional SEO — adopting a more adaptive, holistic approach to visibility.

The goal? Boosting their presence across all search experiences before competitors beat them to it. Are you ready to be one of them?

Customers are using more tools — from AI assistants to local review sites — to decide which brands to trust. Your job? Keep up.

For decades, search was all about taking the number one spot on Google. But search optimization isn't just about keywords anymore — it's about being visible, accurate, and trusted everywhere customers are searching. For brands, that means places like AI search, social media platforms, and directory/review sites like Yelp & TripAdvisor.

So, where do you start?

Here are some good foundational questions to consider :

1. Are your listings complete and consistent? Trust starts with accuracy. Brands that maintain a broad, consistent footprint across diverse platforms perform better in local search.

2. Do you have a high volume of fresh, positive reviews across review sites? AI models analyze review sentiment, context, recency, and frequency to summarize your brand in answers.

3. Do you have an active, authentic social presence? Regularly posting on brand pages and consistently being tagged in UGC (user-generated content) boosts your visibility and signals relevance.

4. Is your data strategy AI-ready? Organizing content in a knowledge graph, tagging content properly, and using structured and unstructured data helps search engines and AI models find and surface your brand in relevant results.

Next, it's time to investigate how you're performing across AI search and traditional search.

Understanding your digital presence starts with measuring it the right way. That's where Scout — a first-of-its-kind AI search and competitive intelligence agent — comes in.

Scout surfaces the metrics that help you understand your brand visibility and performance across traditional search engines like Google and AI search engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok.

Let's break down six key metrics Scout delivers — and how they can shape your strategy:

1: AI rank (by location)

• What it is: The average position your locations appear in AI answers to unbranded and branded queries.

• What it tells you: Whether your brand is discoverable in AI-generated results.

• How it affects your strategy: If you're not appearing in local AI search results, you can use accurate listings, authoritative content, and strong brand mentions across trusted sources to strengthen your digital presence.

2: AI sentiment score

• What it is: The positive, neutral, or negative sentiment with which AI refers to your brand when answering user queries.

• What it tells you: AI summarizes your brand. Scout shows you what it's saying.

• How it affects your strategy: If AI sentiment is negative, improve your review generation, third-party content, and brand storytelling to shift perception.

3: Google rank in local search

• What it is: The average position of your location in Google's Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

• What it tells you: This metric shows your visibility in high-intent, local searches — where most decisions get made. If you're not in the top three, you're likely being overlooked.

• How it affects your strategy: Not ranking? Update your Google Business Profile (GBP), improve citations, and drive more engagement through reviews and Q&A.

4: Google Business Profile (GBP) completeness

• What it is: How fully your business information is filled out on Google compared to your top local competitors.

• What it tells you: Google favors rich, accurate profiles. Scout tells you if you're missing key details that can impact your brand discoverability.

• How it affects your strategy: Best practice is to fill in all fields — including services, hours, categories, and attributes — to improve rank and relevance.

5: Number of photos on your GBP

• What it is: The number of photos your locations have on Google compared to your top local competitors.

• What it tells you: Photos are a ranking and engagement signal. Listings with more images often perform better and get more clicks.

• How it affects your strategy: Make it a habit to regularly refresh photos and add pictures of your storefronts, team, and events to your profile. Prompting customers to add user-generated content (UGC) will also help you boost visibility.

6: Google review volume

• What it is: The number of reviews your locations have on Google compared to your top local competitors.

• What it tells you: High review volume boosts credibility and impacts both traditional and AI search visibility.

• How it affects your strategy: Helps you identify opportunities to use or enhance your review generation and management program to improve search rank and AI sentiment.

Scout surfaces the key metrics that matter most for visibility in traditional and AI search. Run your scan now to see where you rank, how your brand is perceived, and how you compare to key competitors.

Then, get actionable, prioritized advice on what to do with your newfound knowledge.

After showing you where your brand stands, Scout delivers tailored recommendations to help you amplify your digital presence and optimize everywhere.

Be among the first to unlock full AI search insights and competitive intelligence. Do a Scout scan on a single location now to get all the insights outlined above. At the end of the process, sign up for the Scout waitlist and be added to the queue to get access to over 250 performance metrics for multiple locations and customized insights tailored to your brand.