The Amazon effect is taking hold in AI. When consumers successfully utilize a platform for one task and feel they can easily complete other tasks in the same place, they will stay. ChatGPT and its competitors are becoming the default for everything from composing emails to finding therapists. Just as Amazon quietly replaced Google in product search, AI is rapidly building its search user base.
According to McKinsey, half of the world’s consumers now use AI-powered search. Overall, the analysis shows that AI-native platforms have already reached a share of ~5% of overall volume, which, while still small, is increasing rapidly from the start of 2023.
As that share grows, brands will need to think differently about how they create content to ensure that it appears in response to prompts. This challenge applies not only to the written page but also increasingly to video.
Clarity and context are important
The first thing to realize about AI search is that the system doesn’t interpret content the same way humans do. When meaning is implied rather than explicitly stated, technology bridges the gap and has mixed success.
This creates problems with video content. Brands have spent years treating video as a format built around emotion, storytelling, and production value. But without structure, AI won’t be able to derive useful answers from sophisticated brand films. Clever editing or strong creative ideas may work to grab human attention, but content remains functionally invisible to AI systems.
The formats that tend to work better are those built with a clear question in mind, followed by a direct answer, followed by a deeper explanation. In practice, this means that explanatory content, how-to formats, and easy-to-understand demonstrations are often better suited for AI visualization than campaign-driven films designed primarily for reach.
Short videos have already trained people to expect immediate and specific answers. AI search rewards the same instincts at a structural level.
Videos must be easy to read
AI cannot understand videos the way a viewer can. It relies heavily on supporting signals around it, such as transcripts, captions, titles, descriptions, and on-screen text. These are not secondary details. These are often the clearest route for AI to learn what the content is about and whether it’s relevant to the user’s question.
If these elements are vague or missing, your video will be very difficult to interpret, no matter how good it looks. Brands may have invested heavily in production only to find out that the asset provides little value in AI search because the answers are buried or the core topic is not stated clearly enough to be parsed.
This is where many brands still fall short. Videos are often planned based on content calendars, releases, and campaign moments, rather than being created based on actual search intent. This is not built to answer questions, but to appear in your feed. As a result, the gap in visibility between brands that produce engaging videos and those that produce informative videos is widening.
Four stages of content maturity
Some brands have already begun to adapt to this change. Many other companies still treat video as a top-of-funnel awareness activity, separate from search behavior. There are four stages of content and context maturity.
The reaction stage occurs first. At this stage, videos are still being created based on campaign priorities, with little consideration for the questions viewers are actually asking.
Adaptive brands go further. They are beginning to shape their videos to fit the needs of specific users by building content that answers clear questions and adding stronger captions, transcripts, and descriptions to support viewability.
The strategy phase follows. This is when brands start treating video as part of a broader ecosystem of answers. Our SEO, content, social, and production teams align around intent, structure, and discoverability.
The final, most mature phase is predictive. These brands build video formats designed to track emerging questions and behavioral changes and respond to them early. Most of the influence is determined before the video is created.
Easy to unlock reach
The ongoing changes are not moving away from creativity, but video must do more than just grab attention. It must be communicated clearly enough that AI systems can understand, extract, and reuse it.
This means being more disciplined about structure. I will guide you with questions. Please answer as soon as possible. Be intentional with your captions and on-screen text. Treat transcripts as part of your assets, not as custodians. Create videos around what people really want to know, not what your content calendar needs to publish this week.
Clearer videos are more accessible to viewers and more visible in AI searches. As AI becomes more prominent as a discovery layer, its visibility will increasingly differentiate brands that are easy to find from those that are simply well-crafted.
Abby Grocott is Head of Content Strategy at Brave Bison
