‘Search is everywhere’: How JBL is retooling its search efforts for AI

Gaining “algorithmic trust” is top of mind for many marketers, especially as shoppers turn to AI for assistance in their search for the perfect gift or deal this holiday season. But gaining said trust can be harder than it might seem—and some brands are seeking outside help.

Audio brand JBL has been working with Code and Theory to audit its SEO practices, reimagine its website, and develop an editorial content strategy that accounts for an uptick in AI tools, Carolina González, manager, global digital content strategy at JBL, told Marketing Brew.

The aim is to improve how the brand shows up when consumers are searching across various platforms, including large language models (LLMs), and the goal is for the brand’s content output to work for human readers and automated crawlers alike. That’s becoming increasingly crucial: throughout Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year, referrals from LLMs were up 2,434% and, according to Code and Theory and JBL data shared with Marketing Brew.

“We develop stories that are not only focused on search—it’s a combination of talking to you in a way that you’ll feel [it’s] fresh, fun, and engaging for you to continue to read the article, but it’s also technical,” Gonzalez said. “It will be easier for you to understand our features or products and our portfolio overall, but also just common things that people have doubts about—for example, is it actually worth buying a soundbar?”

Search protocol

The content strategy isn’t limited to articles on the company’s website, although that’s certainly part of it. For Black Friday this year, JBL published a gift guide detailing which of its products are best for different kinds of gift recipients. That guide is aimed at responding to how people search across all platforms, not just in conventional places like Google, which informs when and where the brand’s content may show up.

“We want to know how people are searching on YouTube, how they’re searching on TikTok,” Bryn Dodson, creative director, copy, at Code and Theory, said. “The way that we see it, search is everywhere now. But that doesn’t mean that people search the same way on every platform.”

Dodson said that the agency’s goal was to tailor content to platforms based on how users might search and what they might be looking for. One recent YouTube Short from the brand, for instance, compares two different speaker products and was informed by popular search terms on the platform. The resulting video is “optimized for people, crawlers, and AI agents to understand the differences between the [two] products,” Dodson told us.

That video is one of four YouTube Shorts that the company has optimized; the four videos “achieved a 2.61% engagement rate by view—200x higher than JBL’s 30-day average of 0.013%” as well as rank in “the top 10 videos for both engagement rate per follower and total engagements per view on the JBL YouTube page,” Dodson said.

Long haul

Explainer content that details product uses, features, and capabilities using the approach that makes sense for that platform is just one element of how JBL is shifting its strategy for today’s search landscape.

“Creating content with LLMs in mind is not an overnight-growth kind of target; it’s a slow and steady approach that balances both long-tail search opportunities and more seasonal wins,” Dodson said. “It’s about creating that steady, optimized drumbeat across platforms.”

At JBL, the shift in strategy spans regional and global brand teams, Gonzalez noted, and as the strategy continues to roll out, the company’s marketers are keeping in mind varying portfolios, different keywords, and local nuances. For now, the teams are still figuring out the best way to employ the strategy across regions, but have broad overall goals.

“It was important to have a global, centralized view where we aligned on the main pillars and the main things that we wanted to accomplish,” she said. “We wanted to identify what was the best strategy for JBL, and not just a generic strategy for SEO.”