Innovation leverage is fading fast…

We are entering a period of uncertainty in the pet industry as underlying strategic challenges and product proliferation – accelerated by the extraordinary impact of AI – are reframing what competitive advantage looks like. Here we will pull apart and examine the forces at work, identify the impacts and launch a conversation about the next threshold of durable marketplace strength. Stay tuned for our recommendations at the end.

Premium pet brands have spent more than a decade expanding by segmenting the market into ever more specialized dietary propositions: grain-free, ancestral/biologically appropriate, raw, fresh, gently cooked, human-grade, limited ingredient, high protein, functional benefits, sustainably sourced, breed/life-stage solutions, probiotics, freeze-dried, etc. 

However, these successful innovations also escalated the competition. The competitors then normalized them, and what began as a meaningful brand distinction increasingly became a category expectation. 

Don’t get me wrong, product innovation is and will remain essential. However expecting product innovation to fuel lasting brand competitive leverage is becoming increasingly unrealistic.

In sum, here’s the strategic challenge we will examine:

1. When nearly every premium pet food is nutritionally sound and on point, where should competitive advantage spring from?
2. When the supply of premium pet food solutions outstrips demand and the law of economics flip, what should brands do to build and hold incremental gains?

Simply put, more brands and more SKUs and more innovation alongside enhanced nutritional claims are competing for a finite number of households, pet stomachs, shelf space and dollars. At some point, yet another product improvement stops creating proportional incremental demand. Instead it mostly redistributes existing demand. Slowing pet category growth makes this an imperative issue to confront now.

To its credit, the industry has invested enormous resources to improve what’s in the bag, can or pouch. And it worked. The nutritional quality available to pet parents is extraordinary compared with 15–20 years ago.

But there’s an unintended consequence:

• The industry’s relentless pursuit of product superiority has produced an increasingly superior and rather closely aligned field of competitors who chase each other into every innovation territory.

Here’s the current essential truth…

High protein isn’t distinctive. Functional nutrition isn’t distinctive. Probiotics aren’t distinctive. Minimally processed isn’t unique. Human-grade isn’t nearly as distinctive as it once was. Freeze-dried isn’t. Fresh is already spreading among brands. Even claims around ingredient quality, veterinary expertise, and science-backed are increasingly shared territory.

Claim proliferation is upon us. According to Innova Insights 2025 launch data, among new products carrying a high-protein benefit, 71% also carried another health claim, 64% had a digestive-health claim and nearly half added a skin-health claim. Gut-health positioning appeared on 31% of global new launches; immune and skin health each appeared on 22%.

Fresh category is the latest expansion arena: 

Fresh began by successfully challenging assumptions about what pet food should be. Today fresh/frozen territory includes Freshpet, Farmer’s Dog, Ollie, JustFoodForDogs, Nom Nom and numerous others, while conventional premium manufacturers increasingly offer adjacent, similar formats. Fresh/frozen dog food posted a 24.5% CAGR from 2021–2025 versus 5.7% for the overall dog-food-and-treat category. What was once a category disruption transforms into another highly competitive segment.

The same process occurred earlier with grain-free and high-protein formulations. A claim can be true, important and compelling to consumers—and still have almost no competitive currency if a dozen brands are credibly making the same claim.

“High protein” is valuable but not differentiating.
“Science-backed” is reassuring but without being proprietary.
“Premium ingredients” is meaningful without offering separation.
“Veterinarian developed” forges trust but not ownership.

Pricing aside, what happens when brands prioritize reasons to believe over the more elusive yet critical trusted reasons to choose.

We should note, premium pet category strength continues to be a business driver. APPA reported 41% of dog owners and 38% of cat owners purchased premium food in 2024, both up from 2023.

Packaged Facts similarly found that 70% of dog and cat owners remain willing to pay more for foods offering health-and-wellness benefits. While the demand for premium benefits remains strong, what’s becoming harder is capturing a disproportionate share of that demand when so many brands make comparable benefit claims.

Let’s dive in on the underlying economic mechanism fueling current conditions

• Innovation → success → imitation → proliferation → normalization → declining differentiation creates a condition where greater marketing investment is required to deliver the same year-to-year growth report card.

When competitors quickly replicate any innovation, the category may expand but without creating durable, sustainable advantage for the innovator.

The strategic competitive question then changes from:

“What can we make that is better?”

to:

“What can we become or offer that competitors cannot easily replicate?”

Where does the next increment of value surface from when most of the new nutritional niches have already been occupied?

Alongside innovation parity, an unseen contributor is helping enable these current challenges.

Ten years ago when premiumization was gaining momentum, the demand for higher quality ingredients, sourcing, manufacturing exceeded the supply. If you went to market with an authentically better product and handled the retail distribution, support and marketing requirements with skill and creativity, you likely saw solid growth and returns.

The red hot premium pet food market attracted more competitors in the same space, so brands began to look for unique needs, gaps and marketplace niches to serve while securing separation. This also worked for a time until most of those nutritional need gaps had been satisfied. 

Meanwhile many traditional barriers to entry in the pet food business have fallen.

Nutrition and science based formulators are readily available to help bring a product vision to life, while co-packers with sourcing expertise can serve as the asset light path to making a product. AI helps quickly build the business and operations plan while direct to consumer models make it considerably easier to get in front of potential customers (Packaged Facts states 39% of U.S. pet-food sales now occur online). The result is more and more new brands entering an already crowded marketplace seeking attention and share of wallet. One trip around the convention hall at SuperZoo helps verify the environment.

• When supply starts to outstrip demand, the forces of competition begin to shift. Competition turns inward. Brands rush to participate in every corner of novel innovation and you begin to see brand similarity and sameness converge.

This impacts the strategic game plan when category conventions and normalized behaviors keep everyone locked into a cycle that replicates the same go-to-market moves. It simply gets harder and harder to squeeze incremental balance sheet gains year to year when the differentiation of choices narrows. Of note, pricing power also softens when brand distinction is diminished and becomes more trivial.

Prevailing business conditions are demanding improved strategic solutions

Consider the overall industry growth status reported by Packaged Facts: U.S. pet food and treat retail sales is projected to grow just 2.1% in 2026, to $70.45 billion, with a forecasted 3.2% CAGR from 2025–2030. The trend lines show a slower pace with dog and cat food sales rising 14% in 2020, 15% in 2021 and 2022, and 13% in 2023, before decelerating to 3.7% in 2024 and an estimated 2.8% in 2025. 

The supply of premium solutions continues to expand while category growth is moderating. This will simply intensify the fight for new, novel growth solutions. Now is the time to get on this.

So what’s next?

Places where the strategic pet brand building conversation can go:

Proprietary brand meaning—ideas, beliefs, cultural territory, communities and emotional propositions that aren’t bottled up in the formulation. This is a search for a ‘secret sauce’ or true north that may exist inside the organizations’ business structure, operations, behaviors, history, standards and beliefs.

Category creation—not another variant within an existing segment, but identifying an unmet pet nutrition problem that changes how stakeholders will think or behave. When most needs are already met, this is a tougher (but not insurmountable) question overall. 

Authority—owning trust, credibility and belief rather than merely making claims and assertions of performance and outcome. 

Business-model differentiation: experiences, services, retail models, personalization, relationships and other assets that competitors can’t duplicate simply by sending another formula to R&D.

In sum, the product still has to be excellent. Innovation remains essential. But durable advantage will increasingly come from proprietary meaning, authority, community, experience, business model, cultural relevance, category creation or some other asset competitors can’t duplicate by formulating an enhanced recipe and putting another package on the shelf.

An aligned avenue of strategic exploration: industry weaknesses and gaps

When there’s less leverage in products, the challenge to leadership teams is how to create added business value that isn’t easily over-run by competitors. Perhaps it’s time to solve systemic problems the industry faces that other brands elect to ignore or soft pedal.

If you zoom out to 30,000 feet and look at the pet food business there are numerous issues and weaknesses that your brand may be in a position to help solve, and in doing so, to step outside the conventional competition handbook to create a unique story your brand can champion.

A few examples –

• Sustainability is an enormous hole the industry has talked around the edges of but no one leads at the strategic level to authentically resolve the supply chain (system 3) impacts.

• While AAFCO standards enforce conformity on nutrition specifications monitored by state and federal regulators, still quality varies without verifiable consumer assurance of exactly what they’re getting. Is transparency really transparent?

• The conventions of pet retail and product form hold the industry in a commodity-like grip cycle of bags, cans and pouches that present the product in the same fashion brand to brand. At times category conventions beg for fresh thinking.

These are not simple challenges, but one thing is for certain: there is a requirement now for real strategic work to investigate, interrogate and determine what the next roadmap to brand growth will look like. Here are some of the elements worthy of deep dive analysis:

What does the brand currently own?

Which claimed advantages are proprietary versus replicable?

Where has category convergence eroded differentiation?

Which latent brand assets have greater strategic potential?

What consumer/category white space could the brand credibly occupy?

What organizing proposition could drive innovation, communications, retail and go-to-market?

The next growth recipe may not be another recipe at all.

We should begin by answering a harder question: What can your brand credibly own that competitors cannot readily appropriate?

For premium pet brands fighting over increasingly similar nutritional territory, finding the answer may become one of the most consequential growth assignments ahead.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. For more information, contact Bob@Emergent-Comm.com and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

Far too many brands miss the reason and the recipe

Two alarm bell-ringing stats about the current state of brand building:

• According to a study from HAVAS – for roughly 78% of all brands, if they disappeared from the earth tomorrow, consumers wouldn’t really care and instead simply move on to another alternative. (Ahem).
• Meanwhile 85% of advertising has zero impact on brand health.

What does this tell you about the state of brand strength, equity and the tools employed to achieve it? Have we so myopically moved to embrace transactional behaviors that the organization’s most important and valued asset is inadvertently being starved of the fresh thinking and investment it so justly deserves?

As an Emerging Trends Report reader, you likely agree that a strong brand is vital to sustainable, profitable business growth. We know healthy brands deliver lasting competitive advantage as evidenced through unflinching brand evangelism, rapid uptake of new product innovations and reliable repeat purchase. Even through economic down cycles — because the brand matters to users by virtue of its integral relationship with the consumers’ lifestyle priorities and beliefs system. By definition, this is the polar opposite of a commoditized business where price and deal frequency are the most meaningful separators.

Accelerating AI conditions are forcing rapid change

The AI tech revolution is currently conspiring against organic brand strength. It is our singular calling here to fight these growing odds that conflate uniqueness, suppress acts of courage and marginalize the competitive playing field.

What’s going on here?

Every successful brand will labor to own a prominent place in the consumers’ collective memory, such that it is more likely to be top-of-mind in buying decisions, while earning a higher probability of credible recommendation and exerting greater pricing power.

This bulwark of resilience and strength requires that brands be simultaneously different and relevant. The challenge now is the significant shift in why and how people attribute “difference and relevance” to brands that matter to them.

Different: is amazingly less about how a brand performs or how it is made — and more about the perception of why it exists, what it believes and how it expresses itself. Understood purpose and mission loom large.

Relevance: is now primarily attributed to how well a brand is aligned with the consumer’s social values and cultural viewpoint. Fulfilling a functional need remains important, but it’s not the dominant factor.

While brand minders may be aware of these shifts, many are drawing the wrong conclusions – resulting in a marketing approach that’s inadequate for one of two diametrically opposed reasons.

The myth of “Mirror Brands”

The meteoric rise of social media fed by proponents who recite its tactical virtues, has stoked a marketing religion focused almost entirely on winning people’s attention — at the expense of earning the right to be part of their lives. We characterize this marketing behavior as Mirror Branding – meaning the brand operates as a reflection of whatever’s currently hot in popular culture. This is blatant pursuit of virality for its own sake, grasps at fads while routinely mistaking memes for lasting memories.

An example of au courant tactic-over-strategy can be observed in a well-known popular deodorant brand that created a new product tied to a cryptocurrency – in itself inspired by a meme featuring a dog – and launched a campaign on a day when that cryptocurrency is in celebration mode.

Through forcing an impression of difference, occasionally a Mirror Brand can briefly secure a spotlight in popular culture. However, without the hard work of building deep-seated, enduring relevance, they operate on a shorter fuse that eventually fizzles and goes dark. An example in the UK, Liquid Death, the brand built on irreverent disruptive marketing memes, has withdrawn from the UK market after less than two years.

The fallacy of “Shadow Brands”

The marketing misstep that focuses blindly on visibility while failing to deliver any tangible emotional or cultural connection – this is the purview of Shadow Brands. Consumers are aware of their shadowy presence, but remain unclear about their beliefs, deeper substance and mission.

Shadow Brands aren’t necessarily irrelevant, but they can also fade away under pressure. Without a meaningful difference, it’s harder to maintain traction in hyper-competitive markets. Hate to say it, but this is a large and growing group and includes many distressed legacy brands, and a significant percentage of DTC brands that start to struggle after a promising start.

We must raise our ambitions on investing in brand strength and deeper meaning

To be more than a Mirror or Shadow, brands must construct enduring memories around the things people love and love to share. This is much easier said than done and requires full commitment to:

• Conveying a point-of-view that is both meaningful and distinctive.
• Adding value to consumers’ lives – supported through every expression and every experience.
• Showing up in imaginative, inspiring ways that help define current culture.

Specifically, we should be focused on building “Iconic Brands”

Icons are never created in a heartbeat. It takes continuous commitment and investment over time. For example, the Dove brand’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” that celebrates self-esteem among women has been an evolving work-in-progress since 2004.

There is, however, an accelerant. Emergent has been a long-time proponent of integrated communications – the lashing together of multiple channels and disciplines to create a more effective and powerful brand. While the core principles of integration remain important, it’s simply not enough anymore. Radical changes to the marketing and business landscape mean both thinking and practice should evolve. This necessary leap forward is Interrelated Marketing.

It’s no longer possible to earn and maintain growth and business expansion through one-way communication alone. Ambassadors, evangelists and advocates must be enlisted as agents to act on the brands’ behalf. This will require mastering an intricate interplay between consumer-centered earned, owned, and paid media to create a flywheel that propels a brand towards Icon status.

Interrelated Marketing is designed to deliver this outcome by uniquely blending the four key drivers of modern brand success:

1. Unlocking cultural relevance through compelling narratives at the intersection of a cultural tension and truth about the brand that shapes the conversation AND resonates with key audiences.
2. Earning a solid enduring reputation by capitalizing on the influence of brand fans, respected expert voices and relevant credible institutions in authentic ways that cultivate positive, lasting renown.
3. Designing reciprocal relationships through personalized experiences and value exchanges that customers will share with the brand.
4. Driving desired response by satisfying an identified consumer preference with an effective, believable solution and call to action.

Many brands treat these four R’s — Relevance, Reputation, Relationship and Response — independently. But the magic happens when they are harnessed to a common purpose. That is the end-product of Interrelated Marketing: a connected ecosystem of expressions and experiences, where every piece of content, every social post, every event and every initiative builds seamlessly on the last.

The incredible impact of Icons

A reminder: marketing’s primary purpose is to build brands with the strength to deliver lasting competitive and economic advantage.

Despite what some pundits would have you believe, this requires setting the bar higher than simply mirroring an audience’s social media feeds or buying eyeball attention. Instead, the goal must be to earn a prominent, persistent place in a person’s memory by having a positive, enduring, meaningful impact on their lives. This is how brands achieve iconic status.

It’s a prize worth fighting for. Icons deliver impact via increased penetration; deeper, stickier customer relationships; stronger competitive defenses; and more powerful, resilient marketplace momentum. Finally, the bottom-line is the bottom-line: financial returns that are exponentially greater than the costs of its creation and delivery.

For businesses who are ready to make this commitment, Interrelated Marketing provides the right strategic drivers: every idea, every action, every behavior should demonstrate an obsessive focus on unlocking cultural relevance, deeper meaning, mission, belief systems and earning reputation that attracts strong 1:1 relationships.

Brands that succeed in conjoining these four drivers, with the right kind of creative thinking, will generate an impact that is unreasonably greater than the sum of the parts and eventually will win not just a larger share of the market but a greater share of the future.

The sea-change urgently pushing this agenda to the forefront of your planning

• “The transformative potential of AI is not short-form video or treating it as a glorified search engine. It’s to advance human intelligence and what we’re capable of as a species.”

AI is upending how consumers discover brands, and large language models could soon be the window to a company’s reputation — as cast from its own point of view.

LLMs — the smart interloper in between brands and customers

The arrival of Agentic Advisors is at once favorable to guiding consumer decisions and more confident purchase outcomes by delivering unprecedented analysis on the efficacy and superiority of products. The unintended consequence, however, is the parallel rapid commoditization of categories that will be supervised by super intelligent machines who neither care about, promote nor recognize the emotional equity brands work to create.

AI advisors will come between you and your customers and future customers, focused entirely on clinical analysis of product bona fides, formulations, sourcing standards, and authentic delivery of promises. This means the strength of the brand relationship will be paramount to your future, alongside managing the narrative product story LLMs express about your business.

• Your future can’t be left in the hands of AI opinion alone. Your brand’s relational strength and emotional equity through its Iconic status and reputation form the critical alchemy of your future business success.

If this article has you thinking and wondering aloud about the right path to follow, use the link below to air questions and start an informal conversation.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. For more information, contact Bob@Emergent-Comm.com and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

Culture has changed and we must change with it…

For the last decade we have celebrated, described, deconstructed, and devoted countless articles to extolling the who, what, why and how of earning brand trust. It is essential to belief and acceptance of what brands want consumers to understand about their narrative story. It stands at the front door of why consumers join a brand as believers rather than merely episodic (and occasionally fickle) purchasers. 

We have alternately described this marketing era as the trust/sharing economy of the last decade. As evidence, consider the generation of disruptive apps like Yelp, Uber, and Airbnb that created massive markets built on legislating trust by integrating:

• Commitment to transparency
• Implementing layers of reassurance
• • Shining a spotlight on every facet of an interaction

These systems provide an unprecedented amount of perceived control, allowing us to trust complete strangers. Significant levels of value have been generated, and thus how the trust economy prospered. There’s also an unexpected consequence to an engineered trust optimization strategy. Stay with us.

With this foundation, we have charted the benefits of radical openness, of higher purpose and mission as evidence of deeper brand meaning and respected values. We’ve described the beneficial outcomes of revealing an organization’s inner mechanics — how you do what you do. Show it, demonstrate it, don’t just claim it. The theory at work – alongside deeper understanding and disclosure, trust will break out. Some of this thinking by the way, remains true and relevant.

• Our strategic brand-building game plan was constructed on authoring control and certainty for consumers who also crave it. It mattered because risk of disappointment is a fundamental barrier to what brands most want: a consumer who believes and accepts their story and acts on it. However, times have changed. Dramatically so. Unprecedented shifts and moves have occurred that re-calibrate the entire foundation of what ‘trust’ actually means and how to acquire it.

Make no mistake, trust remains foundational to building business, but how we define trust has moved. What’s changed?

The 2025 Brand Trust Analysis

We’ve observed the rapid decline of trust within shifting consumer culture. Look at it this way: when trust in people evaporates, you lose trust in nearly everything. 

We lack trust in our government 

We don’t trust our neighbors

We don’t trust our educational institutions 

We may even lack trust in our friends

In sum, we are far less trusting today than we were before the trust economy came to the forefront. The strategic answer lies in a fundamental recognition of societal shifts and how trust is defined. 

Let’s start with a more humanized way of looking at it, according to a recent report from the Concept Bureau:

“[Trust is] the willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control that other party.” An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust, Academy of Management Review

For the most part we’ve arrrived at a place where people generally trust no one. Certainty has disappeared. Familiar anchors of traditional beliefs, meaning, values, history and security have been diminished by unprecedented events that are connected to how people see themselves and the rules we have been taught about how society is supposed to operate. In sum:

• Our long-standing traditions and values are under assault.
• Even traditional family ties have weakened as people seek guidance from other external sources, some AI driven.
• Respect for a fairly distributed quality of life, and embedded empathetic behavior towards others is in retreat.
• The past vanishes behind us while the future loses its luster and in its place people begin to turn inward.
• Promises and values we have long held in high esteem wither in a sea of disruption.

We know from research that technology has changed how we place trust, and it appears we’ve been successful optimizing away perceived risk.

The key evolutionary trust insight

Trust isn’t really centered in control. It was never about perceived safety, transparency or insurance. In reality, trust is the opposite. It is a willingness of people to make themselves vulnerable to someone else, precisely when they can’t be controlled.

Trust is about embracing risk rather than mitigating it away. Nothing can be accomplished without trust, and if we’re building a brighter future, this a dilemma we need resolve now. If we know trust is inherently tied to vulnerability, then we need to be looking where/how people are allowing themselves to be vulnerable.

The new trust building engine is embracing vulnerability. Here’s the guidance:

1. From proof to empathy: trust as a human exchange

Traditionally, brands earned trust through evidence from third-party endorsements, scientific validation, guarantees, warranties, ratings, and reviews. Those things reduce risk.
But vulnerability asks something different — it requires empathy and shared humanity.

Brand translation:

• Move from “credible authority” to “we see you — we understand your fears, hopes, and imperfections.”
• Brands demonstrate this by acknowledging uncertainty, showing learning in progress, and inviting co-creation rather than just broadcasting behind-the-curtain details.
• Example: A pet food brand that decides to re-evaluate its sourcing practices and brings the brand community along for the discovery process.

2. Vulnerability as an invitation, not an exposure

Vulnerability creates relational depth. When a brand lets its audience in — shows its inner workings, admits mistakes, or opens its process — it transforms from provider to partner.

Brand practices that operationalize this:

• Open book storytelling: Show the making, the sourcing, the human decision trade-offs. Don’t sanitize the narrative; show the nuance.
• Interactive co-creation: Invite consumers to test prototypes, weigh in on reformulations, or help define what improvement means.
• Employee voices: Authentic, unscripted stories from the people behind the brand humanize the enterprise and show vulnerability through human faces, rather than corporate polish.

3. Reciprocal vulnerability: trust as a shared act

Consumers also practice vulnerability — every purchase is a small leap of faith. They reveal their personal values, fears, and aspirations in what they choose.

Brands can mirror that by showing they’re equally invested — willing to take emotional and ethical risks in service of the relationship.

How that looks:

• Values leadership: Taking courageous stands on cultural or environmental issues, not because it’s safe, but because it’s right for the brand’s identity.
• Responsiveness: Listening publicly, not privately — using consumer feedback to shape decisions in real time.
• Long-term consistency: Following through over years, not campaigns, turns initial vulnerability into mutual confidence.

4. Trust 2.0: from control to connection

Old trust mechanics were built on risk management, scripted messaging, brand guardianship.

The new model invites brands to trade some of that control for coherence: shared stories, aligned intentions, and human-scale openness and honesty.

Strategic shifts:

Old Trust	New Trust
Control the experience	Share the journey
Risk mitigation	Emotional openness
Credible authority	Reciprocity
Transparency	Progress
Proof	Presence

5. Framework for brand application

The Vulnerability Activation Model:

Stage	Brand Behavior	Consumer Response
Reveal	Share authentic challenges, trade-offs, or learnings	Curiosity, empathy
Invite	Engage consumers in shaping or validating change	Participation, belonging
Align	Demonstrate shared values in action	Identification, loyalty
Sustain	Continue showing progress over time	Enduring trust

Vulnerability is the next frontier of innovation. This vacuum and its generative force really push us because on the surface, it feels counterintuitive. However, there is simply no other way to create the deep connection people are seeking.

If this article has you thinking about how the evolution of trust building strategy, the importance of vulnerability to your brand and business, use the link below to ask questions and have an open (more vulnerable?) and honest conversation. We can help you build the roadmap.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. For more information, contact Bob@Emergent-Comm.com and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

How you convince ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini your brand should be recommended

For the first time in the history of modern marketing, a machine holding vast global insight and knowledge on every product, category and company, steps in between the consumer and the brand to provide authoritative, easy-to-understand, supported advice on what products to buy. The voice is empathetically human, like your colleague at work, except it possesses more knowledge than all of the world’s experts you could amass in one place at one time — and offers its assessments in a conversational, two-way forum.

LLMs will remember every conversation they have with you.

Imagine what it will understand about your preferences, needs, wants, desires, problems.

It responds to any query in seconds.

Asks follow-up questions to refine its ability to send relevant help.

Is available 24/7 and never gets tired of hearing from you.

It may offer to complete a purchase on your behalf.

Consider what this means when a third party (not your brand) with this kind of knowledge, credibility and influence makes recommendations and offers specific guidance, diminishing any need to first visit your brand web site or expend mental calories tracking down other sources of valued information. Further, it validates conclusions and can support its advice with a treasure trove of data. (Of note, it is vital to your business success to gain LLM trust early and control how your brand is perceived).

We know consumers desire certainty in purchases above all things because every human works predictably to avoid the possibility of making a bad decision (read disappointment).

• Could agentic AI become a recuring advisor for help on purchases? Yes, and it is.
• Could this evolve into a relied upon, habitual “go to”? Likely, unless it violates our requirement for trusted reliability, privacy and confidentiality.
• Will this impact your marketing and strategic plans? It must. Read on.

Global unseen Internet traffic, more than 50% of it, is constantly crawling media, government, industry, academic, political sources, and your web site to inform itself – so in light of this vigilant non-stop digital data mining…

What does AI know and believe about your brand and product line?

Your company?

Your technology expertise?

What will it say about your formulations and claims?

What will it recommend?

Is the narrative accurate?

Is your brand story presented in the best light possible?

What portion of your key messaging came through?

What’s missing?

Will your trade partners trust this on-tap source and rely on it for decisions?

This is not a phase, a passing tech fad or a fringe novelty. It is now business infrastructure, and it’s about to change everything including your approach to strategy, marketing support and the comms game plan.

Note, not all web site content and related information about your business and brand is AI friendly. Brand stewards have a responsibility to do everything possible to better inform and influence the assessments AI platforms are making, thus assuring the brand story is correct, complete and compelling.

Is this for real? Is this now or later?

Marketers may wonder if Agentic AI is a near-in priority. While the use of AI has touched hundreds of millions, the role of agentic advisors in everyday life may appear to be a tertiary phenomenon. We are moving past that at lightning speed. More and more people are turning to their LLMs for advice on everything from gym workout regimens and relationship tips to pet care guidance and what car to buy. The time is now for brands to proactively manage what LLMs believe about their brand and business.

What proportion of consumers are already using AI for advice on purchases?

• U.S. consumers who use agentic AI for online shopping: at least 39% from a survey of 5,000 U.S. consumers. Within that cohort, 47% of them turn to AI for product recommendations and 55% for research. A related stat — Adobe Analytics also reports a ~1,200–1,300% year-on-year surge in AI-search referrals to retail sites.

• Overall consumer AI usage: Menlo Ventures’ 2025 consumer study reports 61% of U.S. adults used AI in the past 6 months — and ~1 in 5 are using it daily (we believe this is evidence of habit formation).

• Shopping-specific: WSJ states 42% of consumers are using generative AI for shopping guidance, thus why it’s time to adopt GEO “generative engine optimization” strategies to show up correctly in various agentic AI platforms.

Bottom line: Across trusted sources, the active shopper-use is ~35–45%, with Adobe’slarge U.S. study clocking in at 39% overall and 47% for recommendations. That’s not a niche.

Agentic Engine Optimization (AEO) is here

Various LLM platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, et al) look at brands and businesses differently, their assessments and recommendations are not all the same. Brands need to start now to inform and influence the various LLMs so their stories and messaging are showing up fully, correctly.

LLMs may not get the full picture —unless we make the effort to guide them

Risk of inaction: AI answers can omit brand differentiators including sourcing, formulation standards, ingredient nuances and science-backed claims – especially if facts aren’t consistently managed and reinforced across various channels of media LLMs scan (press, reviews, Q&A, retailer PDPs, etc).

Without proactive optimization (GEO), AI can misrepresent your brand strengths and story.

As agentic AI becomes the “first advisor” consumers consult, what LLMs recommend or state can sidestep CPG brand messaging, claims, and nuances—creating risk if left un-curated.

AI models learn from “earned media” because they trust the authority

LLMs train on publicly available text—reviews, articles, press, forums—so what’s being said about your brand and your competitors can shape an LLM query response. Managing that narrative is the new strategic game plan. Chatbots are a lot like people—except they are unimagining, unfeeling, electronic ones. The things you need to do to win them over include making your product stories clear, detailed and easy to navigate, clearly explaining your company’s vision. Additionally winning positive third-party endorsement through coverage in the news—which is also relevant to how you inform your real, human customers.

The Agentic Optimization Engine (GEO) game plan

Assessment and ongoing LLM management

This is an evolving story because LLM crawling is constant. You need to know what the various LLM platforms think they understand about your brand and competitors, and to stay on top of that over time. New online GEO management platforms have emerged to help brands track LLMs, gain knowledge of what they know and monitor how this evolves.

LLMs are swayed by narratives

1. Long form, conversational content alongside linear stories with timelines and Q&As are AI crawling friendly. Recency is an issue for AI, so company blogs are an important part of the plan because they are constantly updated.

• Third-party authoritative blogs and e-newsletters matter as AI assigns authority to the voices of outside sources that verify the stories and claims your making. Are you working actively to gain attention in third-party publishing channels?

• Product pages with detailed descriptions and narrative guidance resonate because this is what LLMs are doing – making recommendations on what products to buy so they are evaluating your product bona fides while making their recommendations. Thus why fact sheets, timelines and Q&As are equally important on the LLM crawling journey.

• Earned media is a significant and vital part of this ecosystem because LLMs consider editorial reporting to be a credible and authoritative source. Now your earned media strategies perform double-duty – not only building credibility and awareness of what you want consumers to believe about your brand and business from a respected third party , but also to inform LLMs. Note that AI is crawling wire service platforms so now the decision to put press releases out on the wires gains added importance as a source of AI guidance and understanding.

• Web sites should be optimized to provide easy navigation of content that is AI friendly. The good news: you should be refining your product stories for guidance and clarity anyway, so even if you’re not ready to accept that Agentic AI is here and happening, your work to make these improvements will be good for business anyway.

• Research confirms paid media is less important in GEO guidance because LLMs don’t assign the same credibility and authority to self-promoting, short form messaging. While you hope and may believe an ad is breaking through, a direct recommendation with authority from an LLM platform will be more intrusive, compelling and persuasive than an ad.

Authority and credibility are key because LLMs are looking for that trusted quality to train themselves. Now is the time to pursue GEO with intention, before LLMs start to regiment what they think about your brand and products. In short, don’t just assume they will get the story straight.

Emergent can help you.

• We can perform an audit of your current communications, content, PR and web site to assess where you may have weaknesses in the GEO journey.

• We can help you optimize content plans and programs to address AI friendly information while improving your product communications and education.

• We can help you identify and pursue the right third-party blogs and e-newsletters, seeking to place favorable stories about your brand and products.

• We are highly skilled in earned media and can create immediate improvements in your earned media strategies and placement rates to optimize editorial attention and outcomes.

Use the link below to arrange an informal get acquainted conversation or to ask questions.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. For more information, contact Bob@Emergent-Comm.com and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

Why editorial coverage shapes AI recommendations…

Forever and a day, earned media was viewed as a non-paid and powerful, credible layer in the brand marketer toolbox. It served as a highly intrusive form of communication that already nailed the attention of its audience. Journalism offers a respected third-party voice that intrinsically administers trust and belief in an environment where consumers increasingly tune out self-serving selling messages.

Now the brand communication game plan is evolving as the rapidly escalating use of agentic AI operates as a source of direct guidance and recommendations on purchase decisions. LLMs learn and then report after crawling sources used to inform their analysis.

Editorial media is performing a dual role as a third-party validation of claims made by brands, while also serving as a supplier of important information that teach LLMs. The next time a consumer asks an AI chatbot for a recommendation on pet food, nutritional beverages, or electric vehicles, the advice they receive will be subtly shaped by the journalism the brand PR team has secured.

Editorial coverage is no longer just about influencing brand perceptions. It now plays a foundational role in training and informing the AI models that millions are relying on for trusted guidance.

The rise of Agentic AI and its insatiable need for trustworthy data

AI systems —like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Pi—are operating as autonomous agents and advisors that provide people with personalized recommendations, context, and insights. These systems rank and recommend based on patterns of trustworthiness they consume through crawlers. These unseen digital knowledge vacuums do this by prioritizing sources considered authoritative including consumer, business and trade media.

Key to managing the agentic AI voice is knowing that LLMs perform their ranking and recommending through data they encounter in ‘patterns of trustworthiness’. LLMs train on vast datasets that include publicly available text across journalism, Wikipedia, Reddit, and the open web. The models are continuously updated through tech called ‘Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback’. News stories, product reviews, and media analysis all contribute to that learning loop.

Are you managing the loop?

Here are some examples of trusted teachers in LLM training sets:

• Editorial media publishers and broadcasters like CNN, Bloomberg, NYT, Reuters, The Guardian
• Trade publications (via open-access syndication or licensed content)
• Company press releases published by high-authority domains (PR Newswire, BusinessWire, etc.)  — now elevated in their importance

The influence of PR multiplies from people to platforms

Coverage by respected editorial outlets delivers not only consumer-facing credibility but input data that engages AI-generated opinions and summaries. Unlike social content or ads, published editorial stories live in perpetuity across syndicated news wires, re-aggregated media platforms, and crawled databases.

A well-placed story in Food Dive or Forbes can ripple across multiple LLMs as they use that content to better understand product categories and brand claims.

“If you’re not appearing in credible editorial sources, there’s a good chance the next AI assistant won’t know much about you—or worse, it may learn something inaccurate.” — Noah Giansiracusa, author of “How Algorithms Create and Prevent Fake News”

Practical implications for brands

In addition to analysis of the levels of influence on brand reputation and belief, and the legacy data collection around non-paid impressions, Public Relations now stands at the front gate of managing GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) outcomes.

Trade coverage isn’t just about reaching trade partners.

Business media isn’t just about informing investors.

Consumer media isn’t only about building awareness of product benefits.

All of these are also working in tandem to bring your brand background to AI crawlers. This can be organized, optimized and delivered with intention and best practices towards assuring agentic AI recommendations are correctly, accurately, fully telling your brand and product story.

New goals for PR

Not just about reach or impressions – it now includes visibility in trusted training data ecosystems. GEO best practices will put greater emphasis on the value and importance of —

• Trade media coverage as a resource for more, in-depth analysis thorough reports on new product innovations, key messaging, positioning and other important information that vertical media typically report on.
• Thought leadership articles and by-lined op-eds often published in the same trade channels. These stories convey added texture and leadership for your brand and its role in culture, innovation, research and social issues.
• Data-backed press releases. Releases start out as invitations to a story. Now their importance advances as a device for informing AI advisers. This means press releases should go on the wires regardless of whether the story topic warrants broad distribution, because again, crawlers are consuming the output of credible news platforms like BusinessWire and PR Newswire. Note: LLMs like facts, reports, charts and other data that gives your story context and proof.

Audit and optimize for “AI crawl-ability”

An entire new area of best practices is surfacing to better assure earned media is optimal in this environment of influencing agentic learning:

• Accurate brand/product naming
• Structured context (quotes, data, headlines)
• Syndication and backlinks to brand content

Enabling alongside an ecosystem of owned and aligned content

Same rules apply to owned and social channels with the same considerations in how stories are told and what information is presented in a supporting, confirming role. Strengthen the signal by pairing PR wins with:

• Company blogs optimized for GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
• Expert-authored LinkedIn content
• Wikipedia/Google Knowledge Panel upkeep

Here’s an example of how this might play out

1. A pet food brand lands an article in Pet Age about ingredient sourcing.
2. The article is crawled by Perplexity and Anthropic’s Claude.
3. Six months later, those same AI systems cite the article when users ask about “sustainable dog food.”
4. Result: organic traffic has moved from Google to conversational AI, driving new customer recommendations from a trusted voice.

The significance of this shift brings new meaning and value to the importance of earned media outreach campaigns, alongside efforts to assess, manage and monitor what LLMs think they know about your brand and business (more on this vital topic in our next issue of ETR). A third party is now showing up between your brand and the consumer to provide trusted guidance, without consumers ever visiting your web site.

You can immediately visualize the importance of managing how your brand shows up in agentic AI recommendations — and the ability of your earned media strategies to help influence those assessments.

If this story raises questions about how best to optimize and adjust your strategies to stay relevant in the agentic AI game of influence, use the link below to ask questions.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. For more information, contact Bob@Emergent-Comm.com and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

What does AI believe, say, recommend about your brand and business?

What happens when agentic AI steps in as the authoritative source of information and credible recommendations about brands, products, claims, technology, formulations, ingredient sourcing and emerging health/wellness issues – bypassing any need to visit your website at the start of an exploratory journey? Think for a moment about the implications of a super well-informed digital advisor making trusted recommendations to consumers based on its own assessment of your brand and product strengths vs. competitive choices. We’re standing at the edge of nothing less than a transformative shift in how people and trade partners get information, find solutions and make decisions.

To succeed in the era of LLMs, brands must now optimize for AI agents—not just customers.

• More than 50% of Internet traffic is now populated by non-humans — AI crawlers operating out of sight on a subterranean highway of digital data collection, scouring every available channel to train and inform LLMs so they can be instantly summoned to dispense informed recommendations.
• Unlike any previous technology generation such as Google search, AI speaks to its users in an authoritative, empathetic voice while supplying answers and a point of view. Yes, this is a machine, but we say it again — with solutions and recommendations — from a source that isn’t your brand saying it. A smart source that over time will get more and more familiar with customer needs, aspirations and desires. It never forgets, never sleeps and remembers every detail about preferences, concerns and prior conversations.

Will consumers and trade partners make decisions, form impressions based on what they read or hear from an AI guide? Likely. Could this become reflexive and embedded behavior? Yes.

Managing agentic AI in the battle for trust and influence

What does AI know and believe about your brand and product line?

Your company?

Your technology expertise?

What will it say about your formulations and claims?

What will it recommend?

Is the narrative accurate?

Is your brand story presented in the best light possible?

What portion of your key messaging came through?

What’s missing?

Will your customers trust this on-tap source and rely on it?

This is not a phase, a passing fad or a novelty. It is business infrastructure, and it’s about to change everything including your strategy, marketing and comms game plan.

Over the past 30 years, the phrase “Google it” emerged with the revolutionary idea that any answer was just a web inquiry away. Over the past few years we’re also hearing, “Ask your AI.” Google search links still require effort and time to investigate, collect, digest and assess.

This week I requested AI help to find a hotel near the University campus where my daughter will attend this fall as we prepared to join her freshman orientation. In seconds I got a list of options, then a filter of those choices based on AI’s assessment of the best deal, location and quality plus an offer to assist with booking. Follow-up questions for clarity were answered in seconds with refinements. The process was easy, painless, quick, convenient and presented in an authoritative and helpful voice.

• I went with it. Done and done. For a travel and hospitality brand, or any other business really, you have to be concerned about the presence of a machine that doesn’t behave like a machine gaining a recurring trusted role as arbiter and sage of risk-free choice.

All of this potentially happens without anyone first visiting your web site or social channels. This begs the question of how to control and enable your brand narrative — when an unseen army of AI bots are hoovering everything available, good or bad, right or wrong to formulate its own assessment of your brand and business from what it collects.

An AI mandated moment of truth

The AI agent era flips the script—you don’t search for information – that information comes to you through an intelligent liaison that knows what stakeholders want.

We’ve reported previously on the pervasive levels of uncertainty and anxiety consumers are facing right now. What do they want above all? The return of certainty and a sense of control. Can agentic AI offer a resurgence of perceived control? It’s quite possible that this pipeline from mountains of aggregated data digested and served up in conversational recommendation form could become a trusted partner — when everything else often appears to be self-serving, biased and often requires burning mental calories to unearth and evaluate.

New platforms designed to monitor, gain intel and help inform LLM crawlers

If you want to know the details of what LLMs believe about your brand, new tools have emerged to help bring detailed understanding of what AI agents think they know about your business. From there you’re in a better position to design content that is AI crawler friendly. This will help assure your brand, claims and formulation story is coming across correctly, supplemented with monitoring to see how that plays out in real time.

Out of fear of losing control over brand IP, some businesses may be tempted to erect digital barriers to bot crawling access. However, that also risks ceding future control and diluting the ability to manage a conversation that’s gaining increasing traction among consumers who are going to get more and more comfortable with seeking out AI sponsored advice.

Better to manage this than leave it alone and hope your brand is properly presented, recommended and the story being told is accurate and complete.

With that in mind, LLM engines prioritize the following brand content characteristics:

• Language. LLMs like to navigate rich, conversational text such as blog posts and newsletters, more so than webinars or embedded images.
• Agentic-optimized structure. Prioritized lists, definitions, and guides make it easier for LLMs to synthesize and summarize information.
• Clean, scrapable web sites. Accurate, fully indexed web sites are better than keyword optimization or navigating older legacy pages designed to elevate site authority.
• Third-party earned authority. Outside publications, external media and expert commentary can help confirm, verify and validate your brand story and value proposition.
• Deep customer conversations away from your site. The presence of external reviews and forums generates authoritative mentions, backlinks, and credibility.

Elevating importance of earned (editorial) media to credibility and trust

Whatever your brand states and claims remains an assertion – of what you want people to believe about your brand, business standards, unique strengths and added value. Running alongside the advice of agentic AI, and also a part of its assessment structure, is the increasing importance of third-party credible endorsement.

Journalism and reporting are third party evaluation of what you claim from a respected source. Earned media will play an increasingly important role in the agentic eco-system, operating in two directions as an added authority in what LLMs process, and as an independent voice that validates and verifies what you want stakeholders to believe. PR has always been important resource for credible third-party evaluation. Now it has added gravitas in the system of informing LLMs and also providing a trusted resource consumers also look to for affirmation.

The one-two punch of LLM crawler optimization and earned media outreach forms a formidable strategic foundation for brand storytelling in the era of AI advisory.

Next gen strategies to manage an LLM informed future

LLMs can circumvent brands, cutting them out of directing the consideration process before they even know a consumer is investigating. Thus, why adapting current strategies to engage LLM crawlers can build a virtuous, holistic solution. Optimized web content, earned, and social media leads to better AI references, greater trust and engagement, and prioritization in LLM assessments.

Considerations on the AI crawler journey

It’s time to systematically evaluate how LLMs will impact customer consideration, and how that will change go-to-market strategies. Engaging with new AI crawler intel, analysis and impact tools can help build a fluid map of the customer buying journey alongside an AI-engaged buyer journey, and how brands will show up in AI-powered search engines. While LLMs and AI-powered search are constructed on similar inputs, they can produce radically different results and outcomes. An LLM scorecard can help your brand identify the areas of greatest need and inform the tools designed to secure the optimal brand story and recommendation.

Adapting your strategy to engage LLMs will create a virtuous eco-system: Strong internal, earned, and social content will lead to more AI references, greater trust and engagement, and further prioritization in LLM queries.

If you’re wondering how these developments will impact your business and what’s the best path to navigate an agentic AI informed future, use the link below to ask questions and start an informal conversation.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.