Zoom, Trevant and Crispin add AI-search visibility to creator marketing briefs

August 20, 2026 · Digiday

Viral Nation CEO Joe Gagliese frames the shift plainly: AI models pull answers from the most accessible public information, and creators supply exactly that from outside a brand's own channels. Trevant, Crispin and other agencies have built new audit steps into creator campaigns this year, starting by identifying which existing creators and content types are driving citations in large language models, then tracking those citations as campaigns run. Zoom hired creator-journalist Nayeema Raza this summer to build the company's authority and credibility with AI search systems. Creators themselves have begun building answer engine optimization (AEO) websites and running AEO audits, while agencies ask them to write social captions dense enough with information for LLMs to scrape.

Creator budgets built for AI visibility work best when they prioritize creators already ranking or cited in AI search results, since high-volume hashtag campaigns often fall outside the citation patterns LLMs actually ingest, per Later CEO Scott Sutton. Measurement still lags the enthusiasm: the four agency executives Digiday spoke with pointed to correlation between creator campaigns and AI visibility gains, strong enough to justify new budget lines even before causal proof exists. Reddit citations carry their own risk, since Reddit users have shown skepticism toward brand-seeded posts, per reporting from The Wall Street Journal. Brands should weigh AI visibility as one measure alongside sales and return on ad spend when setting creator budgets.