Growing Your Brand Visibility in AI Search (While Protecting Your IP)

Part of the appeal is that AI often feels more personal. For instance, instead of Googling "sundresses," shoppers may ask ChatGPT, “Can you recommend a brand with blue sundresses that I could wear to my friend’s baby shower?”

For businesses, this shift is stirring up a lot of mixed feelings. About half (51%) of small businesses point to brand visibility in AI search as the biggest benefit of allowing AI crawlers on their site, a recent Clutch survey found. But 43% are most concerned about how crawlers will affect content ownership and intellectual property (IP).

These worries are valid, but ignoring AI isn't an option. Your customers are already using it to find brands and products. With a little strategic planning, you can build brand visibility in AI search without oversharing all your best ideas.

The Opportunity: Brand Visibility in AI Search

Unlike traditional search, AI search generates direct answers or summaries, reducing click-through traffic to individual websites.

As a content creator, that can feel disappointing. The last thing you want to do is spend hours creating smart, well-researched content, only for people to just read a blurb. For those who have monetized their content, this can be particularly troubling: what happens if website traffic drops?  

Still, there are a few benefits to showing up in AI answers:

• Broader reach: AI can introduce your brand to people who might never come across it organically. It’s especially useful for businesses that struggle to rank on the first page of Google with old-school SEO. If you appear in a search engine’s AI overview, you’ll rocket right to the top of the search results.
• Frame your brand as a thought leader: When AI crawlers share and cite your content, customers may view it as more authoritative.
• Gain customer trust: Appearing frequently in AI answers can make your brand seem more credible. If ChatGPT shares your investing advice, for instance, clients will likely see you as a reliable resource.

And the people who learn about your brand in AI search may come back later to buy something.

The Risk: IP Protection Concerns

While AI visibility has clear benefits, you don’t necessarily want to feed all your content to the machines.

As Clutch's survey shows, many website owners are already blocking AI bots from scraping certain data, including proprietary research and reports (58%), customer reviews (48%), and pricing information (43%).

Intellectual property violations are a growing concern. LLMs like ChatGPT are trained on massive amounts of online data and often reproduce information without attribution, meaning your content can be used without credit or sending referral traffic to your website.

It’s probably not a huge deal if AI copies a basic definition from your site. But if it plagiarizes a copyrighted white paper, your site traffic might drop when people find that information somewhere else, decreasing ad revenue and sales. Even worse, AI results may misrepresent your content or outright lie to users, hurting your brand reputation.

Plus, once AI crawlers scrape data, you lose all control over how it's used. It could misquote you, give your IP to your competitor, or write it into a sci-fi novel — not the kind of brand representation you were going for.

Finding the Balance: Visibility Without Vulnerability

Brands sometimes think of AI visibility as an either/or scenario. Either you allow full access to your content, or you do everything you can to shut it out. But there are several ways you can increase your visibility in AI search results without sacrificing your IP. Use these tactics to put up defenses around your most sensitive or valuable data.

Limit access to sensitive assets

You might assume that you’re powerless to stop AI crawlers from scraping your website, but that’s not the case. The right tech can keep them out — or at least tell them not to copy your content.

Start by creating a robots.txt file for your site. This lets you spell out which pages URLs crawlers can use — such as public-facing blog posts and “About Us” pages — and which ones they should avoid. You can also customize this page to deter specific crawlers. For example, you can permit Google's crawlers but disallow OpenAI’s GPTBot, which “indicates a site’s content should not be used in training generative AI foundation models.”

Of course, not all crawlers will respect robots.txt. It’s more like a “no trespassing” sign than an impenetrable, alligator-filled moat around your content: useful, but not foolproof.

The X-Robots-Tag is another helpful tool for limiting access. You can use headers like “noindex” to tell search engines not to index and display your content. This doesn’t keep AI crawlers out — they may still read the page — but it does reduce the chances that your content will show up in Google AI overviews.

Some firewall platforms also let you block AI crawlers. Vercel, for instance, offers a firewall rule that identifies and blocks AI training bots. Use this tool to shield confidential and high-value content.

Monitor for infringement

Even if you follow the above steps, it’s possible that AI crawlers may scrape your IP. That’s because this technology is often changing faster than developers can keep up — and not everyone is using it ethically.

Unfortunately, the best way to figure out if AI is using your content is by monitoring brand mentions in LLMs, using tools like Ahrefs, Lakera, Semrush, and Profound.

Researchers at Imperial College London are also developing “copyright traps.” These are hidden bits of code that you can put in copyrighted works. If AI ingests it, this code will show up later as gibberish text.

If you find plagiarized content, send a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice to the publisher to ask them to take it down. Google also has a reporting channel to request removal.

Practical Steps for Companies

Sort all your content into two categories. There’s content you want AI to see and circulate, such as:

• Brand content, such as your mission statement and product descriptions
• Press releases
• Thought leadership

Use AI SEO strategies to make this content more appealing to crawlers. Google overviews, for instance, often excerpt numbered lists from web content.

AI crawlers also look for authoritative content and original research. If you own a furniture store, try surveying your customers about their favorite interior design trends and sharing the answers in a blog post. Or write detailed tutorials about how to arrange a living room in a cramped apartment. Expertise gets attention.

Then create a second list of content that AI absolutely shouldn’t use, like:

• Confidential data, including patient and financial records
• Technical manuals
• Proprietary research

Work with your content or web development team to create clear crawler policies. For example, you may use “noindex” headers to discourage Google from quoting your employee handbook in AI overviews.

Choose your AI vendors carefully, too. Sure, that AI accounting software can boost your productivity — but it’s not a good option if it’s going to scrape all your financial data. Ask each vendor about their opt-out policies before you partner with them, and review their terms of service carefully.

The same goes for in-house and freelance content creators. Spell out exactly how and when your team should use AI in their creative process. Proofreading marketing emails is probably fine, as long as the messages don’t contain any sensitive information. Feeding proprietary data into ChatGPT and asking it to write a report? Absolutely not.

Of course, AI search will likely look very different three years — or even three months — from now. Keep auditing your policies to see what’s working, and don’t be afraid to make adjustments. Your marketing team may be itching to try a new AI research tool, or maybe you don’t mind if AI uses your older white papers.

Finding the Sweet Spot in AI Searches

Growing your brand visibility in AI search can help you reach new customers and build your authority. But don’t give everything to the bots. Only allow AI to use the content that helps customers and gets your brand name out there. Blog posts, how-to guides, thought pieces — you’re already giving these materials away, so you might as well make them AI-friendly.

IP is a different story. Use firewalls and tools like robots.txt to discourage AI crawlers from scraping this content. That way, you can protect your company’s assets and reputation. With the proper steps, AI will feel more like your advocate, not your enemy.

About the Author

Hannah Hicklen Content Marketing Manager at Clutch

Hannah Hicklen is a content marketing manager who focuses on creating newsworthy content around tech services, such as software and web development, AI, and cybersecurity. With a background in SEO and editorial content, she now specializes in creating multi-channel marketing strategies that drive engagement, build brand authority, and generate high-quality leads. Hannah leverages data-driven insights and industry trends to craft compelling narratives that resonate with technical and non-technical audiences alike. 

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