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The future of brand marketing when nobody visits your website
Barry Schwartz, President, RustyBrick, Inc., joined FTA Global’s Marketing Stack Summit 2025 for a fireside chat on the future of brand marketing when nobody visits your website.
Barry has covered search for over two decades, publishing close to 50,000 articles across Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Land. In this conversation, he explored how AI Overviews and zero-click experiences are changing how marketers measure visibility.
He described Google’s AI Overviews as the biggest shift in search since Universal Search in 2007. While Google claims traffic remains stable, analytics across publishers show otherwise viz, more impressions and fewer clicks. Unlike featured snippets or knowledge panels, AI Overviews package entire answers within results, reducing the need for users to click through.
Barry called this the new normal. AI mode is already live in the US, UK, and India and will soon expand globally. His advice to marketers was direct. Stop relying on Google alone. Build presence across Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, and niche forums. Be where your customers spend time, not just where search engines send them.
On the topic of entities, he noted that clarity still matters. Make sure Google understands your brand and products without confusion. But he added that future AI systems may depend less on structured data and more on understanding context across the open web.
Barry also pointed to the rise of agentic integrations, where brands can plug directly into AI assistants. If someone asks an assistant to book a flight, integrated travel brands could appear as direct transaction partners. This is where conversions will increasingly happen.
For measurement, he urged marketers to start reporting on impressions, mentions, and presence within AI answers alongside traditional clicks. Attribution will never be perfect, but understanding brand exposure is the new metric of reach.
On LLMs.txt, Barry said it is easy to add and safe to use, but not to expect results from it yet. He advised against blocking AI crawlers by default. Let them index, track what happens, and decide later based on data.
Publishers and authors, he mentioned, are hit hardest by these changes. Declining impressions mean falling ad revenue. They will need to diversify through subscriptions, YouTube channels, and brand collaborations to stay profitable.
He closed the session with three takeaways for CMOs:
- SEO fundamentals still matter. Make sure your content can be discovered and indexed.
- Branding is non-negotiable. Stay present across every channel where buyers are active.
- Start experimenting early with agentic experiences to prepare for new ways AI will drive conversions.
Barry ended with a reminder that content still drives everything. AI learns from what brands publish. The companies that create, engage, and stay visible across platforms will be the ones that last.
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