Articles · AI Design
When an AI answer replaces search results, how does your brand show up?
Heathrow Airport teamed up with Adobe to measure how AI answers mention its brand. With one in four travelers reportedly turning to AI first, here's what designers working on brands should look at, with a diagram and tables.
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On October 8, London's Heathrow Airport expanded its deal with Adobe. The headline was a new website built on Adobe technology, but another part stood out: Heathrow will measure how AI like ChatGPT, Copilot and Perplexity talks about it, and look for gaps.
Adobe's reasoning: one in four consumers now turn to AI first when making travel decisions. Once people ask AI instead of typing into a search box, the "first screen" a brand has to care about changes.
First, a disclaimer. Adobe didn't publish how it arrived at the one-in-four figure. Below, I focus on where this trend meets designers' work. I'll also note that this site keeps a guide file for AI, llms.txt, to make it easier for AI to read.
Where AI answers find brands
On a search results page, logos, photos, colors and banners caught people's eyes. AI answers have almost none of that. A sentence or two of summary, one name in a recommended list, a few cited links. That's it.
And those sentences come from what the AI has read: descriptions on the official site, the alt text attached to each image, reviews and articles, and information structured for machines. However strong a brand looks visually, if its written traces are thin, it comes out blurry in AI answers.
The tool Heathrow uses
Heathrow is using Adobe's "Brand Visibility", launched in June. It does three main things.
| What it does | |
|---|---|
| Measure | How often, and how accurately, the brand is mentioned on ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Copilot and Perplexity |
| Find | Questions where competitors appear but you don't, and places you're described wrongly |
| Fix | Suggests which content and information to strengthen |
Sources: Adobe and Heathrow, CMSWire, The Next Web. Adobe says it draws on 289 million real AI search prompts. It's enterprise software, and pricing isn't public.
That tools like this are sold to large companies means "your brand in AI answers" already has marketing budgets attached. Like search engine optimization (SEO), optimizing for AI answers is becoming its own job.
Work that lands on designers
There's a reason this can't stay a marketers-only job. Much of what AI reads passes through designers' hands.
Image descriptions (alt text). The short description attached to each image on a site. It started as an accessibility tool for people who can't see the screen, but AI reads it too. Instead of "image01.jpg" or a blank, a description of what's visible, like "Heathrow Terminal 2 departures, self-service bag drop", helps both people and AI.
The sentence that describes the brand. Logos and colors don't appear in AI answers. Instead, a sentence or two explaining "what kind of brand we are" gets quoted directly. If your brand guide has tone and manner but no single sentence describing the brand, now is the time to write one.
Page structure. AI reads pages with proper headings, subheadings, tables and lists far better. A real heading tag beats large text that only looks like a heading. That's why a design system should cover the structure of text too.
This echoes the DESIGN.md story. That was about letting AI read our design rules; this is about letting AI read our brand. Both come down to describing ourselves in text a machine can read.
So, for now
There's something you can try without big tools.
- Ask AI directly. Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity "what kind of place is brand X?" and "what would you recommend in field Y?". Just checking how your brand or your client is introduced, and whether anything is wrong, is a start.
- Fill in image descriptions first. Pick ten key images on a site you worked on and check that their descriptions aren't empty. If they are, fill them with one sentence on what's visible.
- Write one brand sentence. On the first page of the brand guide, write in one sentence who the brand serves and what it does. It's the sentence AI is most likely to quote.
How to hand AI your design rules is in the DESIGN.md article, and branding references are under Graphic / Branding.
Sources: Adobe and Heathrow, IT Brief UK, The Next Web, CMSWire, TechRadar.