Akamai Optimized for AI Search

Akamai is a global cybersecurity and cloud computing company. The company focused on keeping its brand visible and accurately represented as AI agents reshape how buyers evaluate solutions.

With AI-driven search gaining traction, Akamai faced a growing challenge: Its content was not consistently surfacing in AI-generated answers. To address this, it created AI Brand Presence, a solution that detects AI agents, translates content for machine consumption, and delivers optimized experiences at the edge. The result? Significant gains in citations, mentions, and competitive visibility across AI platforms.

For years, Akamai has invested deeply in SEO to reach buyers across cloud computing, web operations, and cybersecurity. But buyer behavior has changed.

Senior Director of Web Strategy & Operations Jessie Dawson and Vice President of Digital Technology, Insights & Operations Annalisa Church began investigating how AI search was influencing the buyer journey. “We were seeing early signals that AI search was becoming a meaningful entry point, and needed to understand how we were showing up there,” Dawson said.

The internal review of consumer data confirmed the rapid rise of AI-driven discovery and revealed new market opportunities — and risks — for Akamai’s brand. That’s when CMO Kim Salem-Jackson set a new directive.

According to her, “Akamai needs to be visible everywhere our buyers discover, evaluate, and compare solutions. That now includes AI search.”

As the team dug deeper, it realized it lacked visibility into how Akamai appeared in AI-generated answers — and how it compared to competitors. “We didn’t have a way to track mentions, citations, or positioning in AI responses,” Church recalled. “We were essentially starting from zero.”

At the same time, the team recognized a structural issue. AI doesn’t browse websites like humans: It parses and reconstructs content. “If your content isn’t structured for AI, it gets lost or misrepresented,” Dawson explained.

Manual optimization wasn’t viable. “Trying to rebuild pages one by one for AI doesn’t scale,” she added. “It’s a restructuring challenge, not a content creation problem.”

To address this, Akamai created AI Brand Presence, its own solution for controlling how content is delivered to AI systems. Unlike traditional optimization approaches, AI Brand Presence operates at the edge, adapting content delivery in real time without back-end changes, workflow disruption, or human involvement.

The solution intercepts AI traffic before it reaches the origin. It removes unnecessary code and restructures web pages into machine-readable formats optimized for AI consumption, without altering the buyer experience.

“We created a dual experience,” Church explained. “Humans see the site as designed. AI agents get content structured for how they interpret information.”

AI Brand Presence combines two core capabilities:

• AI-optimized context delivery: Dynamically transforms and serves content in structured formats that AI systems easily interpret. This requires no changes to existing CMS platforms and does not impact human user experiences.
• Visibility and insights: Provides a unified dashboard view showing which AI systems access content and what they consume. It tracks how that content influences downstream engagement and referral traffic.

“Now we can easily optimize our content for AI systems, monitor how it’s consumed, and ensure it’s delivered in a format AI can accurately interpret — all secured at the edge,” said Dawson.

Akamai began by focusing on a subset of web pages tied to its Akamai Inference Cloud offering. The team first benchmarked performance across key prompts. With AI Brand Presence in place, Akamai quickly gained deep insight into AI-driven discovery. According to Dawson, “For the first time, we could see how we showed up in AI answers.”

But the real advantage came from acting on those insights. “We moved quickly from measurement to real-time optimization,” Church emphasized. AI Brand Presence optimized those pages by synthesizing Akamai’s existing content, delivering it directly to AI agents in a format they could easily interpret.

The initial results were impressive:

• 85% more total citations for optimized pages
• 38% more citations across a broader set of prompts
• 364% increase in brand presence for non-branded prompts**
• 133% increase in brand presence versus competitors in ChatGPT

“Real-time insights keep us ahead in AEO [answer engine optimization] and GEO [generative engine optimization], positioning our brand as the answer,” Dawson continued. “We started showing up in conversations we weren’t part of before.”

Following the success of its initial deployment, Akamai is expanding AI Brand Presence across its website. The goal? Ensure every page is optimized not just for human visitors, but for the AI agents increasingly shaping buying decisions. “This is a new layer of the internet,” Dawson said. “And we’re building for it.”

As AI continues to redefine how information is discovered and consumed, Akamai is positioning itself at the forefront of that transformation. “We’re taking control of how our brand shows up in AI-first experiences,” Salem-Jackson added.

Akamai’s experience highlights a broader shift: Success now depends on how well content performs across both traditional search and AI-driven discovery. Rather than choosing between SEO and AI optimization, Akamai is building content that works in both contexts — ensuring it ranks well and is accurately interpreted by AI systems.

“The companies that figure this out early will have a real advantage. Because once that gap shows up in pipeline, it’s already measurable — and harder to fix,” Salem-Jackson concluded.

* Source: forbes.com

** Showing how often AI recommends your brand when people aren’t already asking for you, such as “Which cloud can ensure my real-time AI inference runs faster and more securely?”

Akamai is the cybersecurity and cloud computing company that powers and protects business online. Our market-leading security solutions, superior threat intelligence, and global operations team provide defense in depth to safeguard enterprise data and applications everywhere. Akamai’s full-stack cloud computing solutions deliver performance and affordability on the world’s most distributed platform. Global enterprises trust Akamai to provide the industry-leading reliability, scale, and expertise they need to grow their business with confidence. Learn more at akamai.com and akamai.com/blog, or follow Akamai Technologies on X and LinkedIn.