AI Search Is Growing 43% Per Year. Here Is the Marketing Strategy Built to Capture It

Most brands are invisible in AI-generated answers. They may rank on Google, but when buyers ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for a recommendation, those brands do not appear. A New York-based digital marketing agency called Sutra Creative is now offering a structured set of programs specifically designed to close that gap, according to a September 17, 2026 press release from IssueWire.

The announcement carries some notable data behind it. AI search visits grew 42.8 percent year over year between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026. Visitors arriving through AI citations convert at 4.4 times the rate of standard organic traffic. And the overlap between Google's top-ranked pages and pages that AI engines actually cite has fallen below 20 percent. Ranking first on Google does not mean appearing in AI answers.

Key Takeaways

• AI citation visibility is now a measurable, separate channel. Sutra Creative positions Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) as the two most urgent additions to any brand's marketing stack, separate from but built on top of traditional SEO.
• Sutra offers four programs: an Authority Gap Audit (mapping where a brand is missing from AI citations), Presence Building (technical SEO, AEO, and GEO combined), Personal Brand Strategy (building named expert recognition that AI engines weight in citation selection), and Full-Stack Systems (CRM, marketing automation, and workflow infrastructure).
• Founder and executive authority matters. AI engines like Claude and Gemini reportedly weight named expert presence heavily in citation selection, making personal brand a direct input to a company's AI visibility score.
• Content structure is a key variable. Sutra restructures existing content with answer-capsule formatting and entity schema, alongside building a third-party citation network that AI engines rely on when selecting which brands to name.

The agency was founded by Harsh and Akanksha, each with nine-plus years in content strategy, and focuses on SMBs and mid-market B2B brands.

Read the full article on IssueWire.