Namibian businesses are facing a new digital visibility challenge as artificial intelligence platforms increasingly influence which brands, products and services consumers discover and consider online.
The shift from traditional search engines towards AI-generated answers was the focus of V5 Digital’s second First Fridays technology session in Windhoek, where businesses were shown how their brands appear across platforms including ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok.
V5 Digital founder Armin Wieland said the “Visible to AI” session focused on how companies can determine whether AI systems recognise and surface their brands when responding to user queries.
“Today’s topic was visible to AI and essentially was all about, as a brand, company or organisation, how visible or invisible am I to the AI search engines or bots,” Wieland said.
The development is creating a new layer of competition for businesses online. Instead of competing only for prominent positions on conventional search engines, companies increasingly need to consider whether AI systems mention or recommend them when consumers ask for products and services.
Andrew Walmsley, founder of Visibiliti.ai and Techsys Digital, said consumers are using AI platforms to inform purchasing decisions, including choosing brands, insurance products, holiday destinations and tour operators.
“What Visibiliti does is it helps brands to understand whether they’re being mentioned in those AI answers, whether they’re being recommended, and if they’re not, who is and why,” Walmsley said.
Visibiliti.ai tracks brand mentions across AI platforms and compares how businesses perform against competitors across different prompts.
The technology can identify which companies are being surfaced in AI-generated responses and highlight gaps in a brand’s digital presence that could affect its visibility.
Businesses attending the Windhoek session were shown how to enter their website domains into the platform to measure their AI visibility, benchmark themselves against competitors and identify areas where their digital content could be strengthened.
The emergence of AI-powered search is also challenging traditional search engine optimisation strategies.
