Future starts to sharpen its AI search visibility playbook

Future is also selling it as part of branded content packages to brand clients to boost AI summary citations.

Future’s push to rank in AI search is part of a larger strategy to diversify its traffic sources and lessen its reliance on Google Search traffic, a move other publishers like People Inc. have prioritized in the past year. The company has diversified its traffic sources to now have a “pretty even mix” of referral channels, including Google Discover, email, social and direct traffic. The result: Google Search makes up about 27% of Future’s overall sessions, compared to well over 50% in 2019, according to Simon Collis, Future’s svp of content strategy and audience development.

Similarweb data shows unique visitors to some of Future’s top sites has declined year over year, however. Tom’s Guide was down 35% year over year to 16.7 million in December 2025. TechRadar was down 38% year over year to 12.8 million. But Who What Wear was up 63% to 7.6 million in that same timeframe.

“Growing traffic is hard. Our traffic isn’t up, but I think we’re more influential than we’ve ever been,” Collis said.

This diversification serves as a strategic shield against AI and platform volatility for Future’s business. Only 16% of Future’s total revenue is impacted by website sessions directly, due to its branded content business that isn’t impacted by traffic fluctuations, Collis said.

“The more diversified you are, the more hedged you are against whatever is coming next,” Collis said. “Our sites are so different. We have sites where they get 70% of traffic from [Google] Search, [some get] 80% of their traffic from Discover. We’ve got sites that get [30-40% of their traffic] from email. It really varies according to the site.”

Since using the tool, TechRadar has become among most cited sources for ChatGPT and Claude, according to research presented at an event hosted by AI search optimization company Profound in October 2025.

Future decided to build its Optic tool after finding third-party tools were too focused on brands and not helpful enough for publishers, Collis said. AI visibility tools are focused on brand appearances, in his opinion, measuring how often a brand was mentioned against its competitors and what was being said about it. But publishers like Future want to know “where the information is coming from in the first place, which specific pages are feeding the models, and how our content is actually influencing the answer,” he said.

Future’s own AI visibility tool builds “unbiased” prompt sets — rather than just focusing on prompts and keywords that the publisher knows its sites and content appear for, it tests numerous, more granular prompts to look for other places where they may appear.

“A lot of AI visibility tools today are brand-first, so the underlying prompt sets skew evergreen and task-oriented. Publishers — especially news publishers — need a different framework because their ‘visibility moments’ change daily,” said John Shehata, CEO and founder of SEO analytics firm NewzDash.

Without publicly available search keyword rankings for AI tools, Future tracks its AI visibility for 13 subverticals to get a deeper understanding of its mentions and citations. Instead of looking at prompts only about “tech” or “music,” Future tracks “music making” and “hi-fi,” for example, Collis said. Narrowing it down to subverticals provides a clearer and less subjective set of keywords to analyze, according to him.

Currently, Future’s brands rank as the leading publisher for six of the 13 subverticals, and for five of them they’re second — an improvement the publisher attributes directly to the tool, he added. That means Future’s sites are more likely to be cited in AI Overviews generated by those keywords than any other publisher, Collis noted.

Being a proprietary tool, Future is holding the details on how Future Optic works close to the vest. Collis declined to explain what goes into it, saying it was a mix of SEO, decades of content, schemas, and data and content structures.

“We are definitely seeing that there are things which are not just like traditional SEO tactics and so on that seem to have quite material effects on visibility,” Collis said.

Brands are grappling with many of the same AI-driven search disruptions as publishers. As AI-generated answers increasingly intercept traditional search journeys, click-through rates to brand and retail sites have softened, forcing marketers to rethink how discovery works in an AI-first environment. In response, brands are pouring attention into AI search discoverability to try and ensure their products, services and expertise surface when users ask relevant prompts in tools like ChatGPT.

That scramble has helped fuel a cottage industry of third-party vendors offering AI visibility and prompt-tracking services over the past six months, underscoring why publishers — like Future — see an opportunity to move into this space themselves.

Future Optic can also increase AI citations and mentions of Future’s branded content. It’s selling branded content packages to clients in telecomm, CPG, luxury and beauty categories looking for increased brand visibility on LLMs. It’s part of a longer-term strategy to monetize expertise in AI search surfacing as an additional service to branded content clients.

“We’re starting with more clients who have well-branded, highly visible types of products,” said Michael Peralta, Future’s chief revenue officer. He declined to share how many brands are using Future Optic, or how much it’s charging clients for this tool.

A Samsung campaign drove a 28% growth in citations from Future sources in three months, Peralta said. The campaign resulted in an uplift in mentions between 23% and 33% and 4,754 LLMs citations at the end of August, according to a company presentation at the end of last year.

“If a publisher’s AI visibility tool can help inform campaign setup decisions — such as keyword strategy, content themes, and sponsorship alignment — it becomes useful as part of the strategic process, even if AI presence alone does not yet guarantee engagement,” said Alicia Gehring, svp of media strategy at independent ad agency White64. 

She added, “Marketers are still learning how to optimize for AI environments. A publisher that can provide a credible, transparent view into how partnerships and sponsored content improve a brand’s authority within AI platforms would meaningfully strengthen our ability to recommend and prioritize publisher relationships.”