“When nearly three-quarters of queries on AI agents are "zero-click" – meaning the consumer never actually visits the brand's website – ensuring your brand is positively represented in the LLM's training data by appearing in these social spaces is critical.”

^{Dorothée Gardon, Global Marketing Strategy & Integrated Media Director, IKEA}

Brands must learn to influence the algorithms and systems that determine what humans see. With the rise of "zero-click" answer engines, ensuring your brand is cleanly readable, highly trusted and frequently cited within an LLM's ecosystem is critical to long-term discoverability.

To win the recommendations of these AI bots, brands must transition to earning authoritative "citations" from LLMs. As Estée Lauder’s Chief Marketing and Digital Officer Aude Gandon notes, brand-owned editorial is back because "brand websites are a very good trusted source." However, AI models don’t only rely on corporate websites; they pull heavily from off-site sources. In the agentic world a brand’s reputation is deeply shaped by external signals like social reviews, PR and community discussions. The most successful campaigns at Cannes this year achieved breakthrough by aggressively influencing both human communities and machine algorithms.

A standout example of this dual-targeting in action is Dove’s "r/eal Reviews" campaign. By elevating authentic peer-to-peer dialogue over corporate copy, Dove did not just win the trust of human consumers; it actively fed the data ecosystem.

Taking algorithmic influence a step further, LUX's "My Algorithm" campaign with VML worked directly with Meta and TikTok platform teams to map the exact signals that carry the most algorithmic weight. Instead of designing ads just for human eyes, LUX engineered social assets with specific visual codes, audio frequencies and captions explicitly intended to instruct and redirect the curation algorithms.

The opportunity

Your digital assets must be structured for machine readability. CMOs must task their technical and search teams to move beyond traditional SEO and adopt GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation). This requires restructuring corporate websites with precise schemas, tagging and direct Q&A formats so web-scraping algorithms can easily ingest your data as an authoritative source. And because AI models scrape peer-to-peer discussions, building an active, authentic presence in community forums is no longer just a social media tactic – it's a table stakes requirement for feeding the data engines that recommend your brand. It underscores the critical need for a single, connected system for growth – one that unifies data and intelligence to provide a transparent, end-to-end view of the entire marketing ecosystem.

^{← WPP Cannes Wrapped 2026}