For years, search has favoured the biggest players.
Large brands with deep pockets, established authority and huge content teams have dominated Google. They built vast content libraries, invested heavily in backlinks, and secured the top positions for the most valuable keywords. If you were a challenger brand, competing head to head often felt like trying to outspend a multinational with your marketing budget.
That model worked well in the era of traditional SEO.
But search is changing. Rapidly.
We are now moving into a world where visibility is not just about ranking first. It is about being included in AI generated answers. And this shift creates one of the biggest opportunities challenger brands have seen in years.
The old SEO advantage favoured scale
Traditional SEO still matters, but its core mechanics are weighted heavily toward scale:
- Authority signals like domain strength and backlinks - metrics large brands build over years.
- Ranking positions within a list of blue links, which still dominates traffic for many categories.
- Volume content programs, where bigger teams produce scores of articles to cover every keyword variation.
For challenger brands, this environment has always been tough. You’re racing uphill against incumbents with 10× the content and budget.
But that model is about to become far less decisive.
AI search changes the rules
AI powered search engines do not think the same way traditional algorithms do.
They are not simply ranking pages. They are synthesising answers.
When someone searches using Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT or Perplexity, they are often shown a structured response that pulls information from multiple sources. Visibility now means being cited, referenced or used to inform that answer.
This is a profound shift.
Inclusion is no longer solely dependent on who has the biggest backlink profile. It depends on clarity, authority of insight, structured information and how well your content answers a specific question.
In other words, precision can outperform scale.
Why challenger brands are better placed than they think
Challenger brands have three natural advantages in this new landscape.
1. Speed
Large organisations move slowly. Content passes through layers of approval. Strategy shifts take months. Challenger brands can identify a question, create a definitive response and publish within days.
In AI search, speed matters. Early, well structured answers to emerging questions are often the ones models learn from and reference.
2. Focus
Big brands often produce broad content designed to capture volume. Challenger brands tend to know their niche inside out. They understand the specific pain points, objections and language of their audience.
AI systems reward content that directly and clearly answers real user intent. Depth beats fluff.
3. Clarity
Smaller teams are often closer to product, customer and market reality. That clarity translates into sharper insight. AI engines favour well structured, concise, authoritative explanations. Not generic marketing copy.
When your content genuinely helps, it becomes useful training data and a credible citation source.
What winning in AI search actually looks like
Competing in AI search does not mean abandoning SEO. It means evolving it.
Here is what challenger brands should be prioritising now.
Create answer led content
Structure pages around real questions. Use clear headings. Provide direct, comprehensive responses.
Design for extractability
Use bullet points, summaries, data points and structured sections that can easily be interpreted by machines.
Demonstrate expertise
Show authorship. Include original insight. Reference credible sources. Authority is increasingly about demonstrated knowledge, not just domain strength.
Measure differently
Rankings still matter, but so do AI citations, brand mentions within AI tools and referral traffic from conversational platforms.
The brands that understand this shift early will build disproportionate visibility.
Why bigger brands may be behind
Enterprise marketing teams are still heavily invested in traditional SEO metrics. Keyword rankings. Traffic growth. Backlink acquisition.
These remain important, but they are not the whole story anymore.
Organisations with established processes can struggle to adapt quickly. Budgets are allocated based on legacy KPIs. Teams are incentivised around positions rather than inclusion.
That inertia creates space.
While larger competitors refine old tactics, challenger brands can build AI visibility from the ground up.
The window of opportunity is now
Every major shift in marketing creates a temporary imbalance.
Those who adapt early gain outsized returns. Those who wait end up playing catch up.
AI search is that shift.
Challenger brands do not need the biggest budget to win in this environment. They need strategic clarity, fast execution and content designed for how people now discover information.
This is exactly the mindset we have embraced at Thing or Two.
We have been playing the challenger game for years. Competing against larger agencies. Outmanoeuvring the big fish. Finding the angles others miss.
We are already helping brands understand how to get surfaced and cited within AI platforms, not just ranked in traditional search results.
If you want to understand how your brand can show up in AI answers and not just on page one, get in touch.
This is a David and Goliath moment, and the challengers who act now will land the first stone.
