AI Is Now Marketing’s Gatekeeper: How Brands Can Influence And Leverage

Despite recent minor gyrations on the Dow reacting to AI hiccups, just earlier this month the Super Bowl made AI itself more visible than ever to consumers. For marketers, the deeper shift to put into action is how AI now determines which creators and brands get surfaced—and trusted.

AI as discovery’s new gatekeeper keeps coming clearer.

It was the Super Bowl that surfaced that reality with concentrated vigor.

Nearly one in the four national ad spots—about 23%—was tied directly to artificial intelligence, either as the product itself or as the technology powering the message. OpenAI and Anthropic promoted ChatGPT and Claude to mass audiences. Google and Amazon positioned Gemini and Alexa+ as embedded assistants inside everyday life. Meta showcased AI-enabled smart glasses as experiential technology.

Enterprise platforms appeared just as prominently. Salesforce, Ramp, Rippling and Wix framed AI as operational leverage. Ring emphasized AI as an invisible intelligence layer inside consumer products. In one case, Svedka positioned its commercial as largely created using AI tools.

AI dominated the cultural moment.

But the real shift wasn’t about ad spend—it was about who’s in control of discovery and authority.

AI systems increasingly mediate discovery itself—deciding which creators, publishers and brands get surfaced, cited and trusted. For marketers, the battleground has moved from winning search attention to prevailing in authority.

Where AI Works—And Where Consumers Push Back

That distinction came into focus in a recent conversation with Kayla Castro, Senior Manager of Affiliates and Partnerships at Zenni Optical.

When Zenni leaned more intentionally into AI in 2024, the goal wasn’t automating creativity. It was reducing friction in a category that historically depended on physical try-on.

“In some of our earliest experiments with AI-generated creative,” Castro said, “we learned that authenticity matters a lot to our customers, especially when it comes to seeing how eyewear looks on real people. Those insights helped shape how we use AI today: not as a replacement for marketing creativity, but as a tool to test ideas faster, better understand what resonates with shoppers and improve product discovery and the overall customer experience.”

The lesson is clear: AI can enhance experience. It cannot manufacture authenticity.

Gen Z may be fluent in AI tools, but fluency does not equal trust. As AI-generated content proliferates, visible human presence increasingly signals credibility. Authenticity isn’t nostalgic—it’s strategic.

AI’s Quiet Power Move: Authority And Partnerships

Where AI proved unexpectedly powerful for Zenni wasn’t creative production. It was partner discovery.

As consumers began asking nuanced questions about eyewear and eye health inside AI systems, Zenni examined which sources those systems cited. That surfaced an affiliate opportunity the company hadn’t previously considered.

Castro noticed AI-generated answers repeatedly referencing Fox News articles related to eyewear. Only then did Zenni realize the publisher had launched an affiliate program. After onboarding ahead of the holidays, the partnership began driving measurable results.

“That was a partner that just wasn’t on our radar before,” she said.

Consumers are no longer typing blunt, transactional queries into search engines. They’re asking contextual, conversational questions—and expecting synthesized guidance. AI systems respond by drawing from trusted publishers, expert reviews and affiliate-enabled content.

The path to purchase is compressing. What once required multiple clicks now often happens inside a single AI-generated answer. Authority compounds in that environment. The brands and creators most consistently cited gain disproportionate visibility.

The Scale Vs. Trust Problem

Influencer marketing still faces a constraint AI hasn’t solved: human bandwidth.

Zenni works with hundreds of influencers through an always-on, performance-based affiliate model. But when it comes to deeper campaign relationships, the field narrows dramatically.

“There are millions of influencers,” Castro noted, “but the hard part is figuring out which 10 relationships are actually worth the time and cost to build meaningfully.”

AI helps narrow the field by filtering thousands of creators into manageable shortlists based on content history and brand fit. But final judgment remains human.

AI can scale filtering. It cannot scale trust.

What Platforms See That Brands Often Miss

From the platform side, Dave Yovanno, CEO of impact.com, sees the same tension playing out at scale.

Yovanno says, “I think of AI as a power tool—faster and more efficient than manual research—but still dependent on skilled operators. As AI-generated content becomes more prevalent, human credibility becomes more valuable, not less.”



This new way forward on credibility “reflects the broader structural shift in discovery,” Yovanno says. “Consumers are no longer typing blunt, transactional queries into search engines. They’re asking contextual, conversational questions and expecting synthesized guidance. Those AI-generated answers frequently draw from trusted publishers, reviewers and affiliate-enabled content. In effect, the path to purchase is moving inside the answer itself—compressing what used to be multiple clicks into a single response.”

One lesson marketers can take from this, Yovanno points out, is that “Large language models don’t invent authority; they aggregate it. They surface what credible creators, publishers and communities are already saying. That means brands must understand how they appear inside AI-generated answers—and which voices are shaping those responses.”

But, he also observes, “AI can enhance experience, but it cannot manufacture authenticity. That dynamic is especially pronounced among younger consumers. Gen Z is highly fluent in AI tools, yet is deeply skeptical of content that feels synthetic or engineered. Brands leaning too heavily into AI-generated personas risk eroding trust at the exact moment consumers are demanding proof of real-world credibility—in a real sense human presence has become a premium signal.” He describes AI as a power tool—faster and more efficient than manual research—but still dependent on skilled operators. As AI-generated content becomes more prevalent, human credibility becomes more valuable, not less.

Large language models don’t invent authority; they aggregate it. They surface what credible creators, publishers and communities are already saying. That means brands must understand how they appear inside AI-generated answers—and which voices are shaping those responses.

In this environment, authority compounds. The path to purchase increasingly happens inside the AI response itself.

The Marketer Takeaway

Summing it up:

• Culture still creates attention
• Creators and experts convert attention into belief
• AI systems determine which voices get surfaced and scaled
• Partnerships turn trust into measurable outcomes.

The brands pulling ahead aren’t choosing between AI and influencers. They are designing systems where AI drives discovery and efficiency, while humans remain responsible for judgment, authenticity and relationships.

As Castro put it, “Marketing is about stories—and stories need to be told by people.”

AI may have bought airtime on the Super Bowl. But authority—and trust—will determine who wins long after all the commercials end.

Also published in: Forbes