A recent report by LEOPRD, a strategic advisory firm specialising in AI visibility, outlines the factors shaping answers provided by AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and CoPilot for Australian businesses.
The "LEO Insights Report 2025" highlights a significant shift in how AI platforms perceive and prioritise marketing content. Traditional marketing efforts are becoming less visible to the algorithms used by large language models (LLMs), fundamentally altering brand discovery and perception.
The research demonstrates that earned media constitutes 62% of brand visibility within AI responses, as opposed to less than 20% from company websites and owned channels. This emphasises AI's reliance on summarised information rather than search-based findings.
Celia Harding, Founder of LEOPRD, remarked, "AI doesn't search - it summarises. And those summaries are increasingly deciding how customers discover and trust businesses."
The study closely examined the major AI platforms, revealing distinct differences in their evaluation of brand authority, reputation, quality, and value. ChatGPT, for example, relies heavily on consistent media coverage, expert opinions, and awards when generating its responses.
The report finds that each platform has a unique "personality" in how it assesses information. ChatGPT places 30-40% weighting on media coverage, while Perplexity Sonar focuses on recency and reviews. Gemini prefers policy papers and data-backed sources, and CoPilot bases its evaluations primarily on structured metadata, FAQs, reviews, and LinkedIn information.
Anaita Sarkar, CEO of Hero Packaging, commented, "AI doesn't care what you say - it cares what others say about you, in credible places, over time. Founders will spend on ads before they invest in the kind of content that trains AI. But brands that win long-term solve real problems in formats AI can cite."
Professor Ben Newell, Director of the Institute for Climate Risk and Response at UNSW, provided insights on the implications of this shift. "AI is becoming the lens through which brand information is filtered - but it's still a black box. That makes misinformation, greenwashing, and brand misattribution harder to detect - and harder to challenge."
The report indicates a growing need for businesses to proactively manage their AI visibility, highlighting the risk of being misrepresented or overlooked in AI-generated summaries. Supporting independent journalism is deemed essential as trusted third-party media are consistently ranked higher than a brand's own content within these platforms.
Celia Harding emphasised the emergence of the "credibility economy," stating, "We've shifted from the attention economy to the credibility economy. Brand-building today is about the signals you send - and where they show up."
The report concludes with contextual trends, noting a decline in Google's market share for the first time in two decades and the widespread integration of LLM-powered discovery into core products by major tech companies.
