Brands are starting to treat their websites less like storefronts and more like searchable bodies of knowledge. That shift is partly about AI search, but it is also about something more familiar: giving people a reason to remember what a brand stands for.
In a reported strategy now being pursued by Fender and Marshall, editorial content, video series and cultural history are being used to make the brands more visible when people research products through ChatGPT, AI summaries and traditional search.
Fender and Marshall are turning history into a search asset
Fender has overhauled its website around the idea of a storytelling “front door,” with short videos about the company’s heritage, the artists who played its instruments and the craftspeople who make them. Its YouTube output includes content around 75 years of the Telecaster, alongside pedal demonstrations.
Marshall is taking a similarly editorial route with “Dead Venues,” a YouTube series that stages performances by new bands in long-gone venues including London’s London Fog and New York’s China Chalet. The campaign connects Marshall’s amplifier heritage to its current ambitions in headphones, live music and artist development.
The Hendrix connection is more than decorative history. Marshall’s own account of its relationship with Jimi Hendrix gives the brand a credible cultural reference point, while the wider campaign uses that kind of history to support a more current identity.
The useful content is the point, not a shortcut to rankings
Digiday cites research showing that seven in 10 U.S. consumers use ChatGPT or AI summaries when researching products or companies. It also reports that 75% of marketers plan to increase spending on visibility in AI assistants next year.
That explains the urgency, but it does not prove that a glossy video series will automatically make an AI system recommend a brand. Paid media practitioners quoted in the report are still testing whether promotion can influence what large language models retrieve.
The stronger lesson is simpler. A keyword-stuffed blog post gives an AI system very little distinctive material to work with. A brand that publishes expertise, examples, cultural context and firsthand experience creates a richer set of signals for both machines and people.
AI search is making brand content more important, but not because every article needs to be engineered for a chatbot. The brands with the best chance of being remembered will be the ones building something worth remembering in the first place.