Search is no longer confined to the search bar.
It’s everywhere.
Large language models. Social feeds. AI-powered answers that decide what consumers see first — and what they never see at all.
For JBL, this isn’t a future trend; it’s today’s reality.
From speakers and headphones to earbuds, JBL’s brand is all about joyful expression and amazing sound. But to connect with customers, you need to be heard in search.
JBL’s audience already searches socially — 77% say they’re “Googling” when they’re really searching on TikTok — while AI chatbot referrals to retail sites have surged by 4,700% industry-wide.
JBL saw this shift coming early. In response, the brand created the industry’s first AI-native discovery system built for the way search works now.
Introducing Project Surround Sound — JBL’s invention for the era of AI search.
Project Surround Sound is a proprietary, first-of-its-kind framework that redesigns how a global brand becomes visible inside machines. It turns JBL into a brand that AI systems can trust and recommend while staying culture-forward and unmistakably JBL.
The innovation starts with AI agents.
JBL deployed custom brand and product intelligence agents to map how real people search across YouTube, TikTok, Google and leading LLMs. These agents analyzed conversational questions, comparison behavior, sentiment signals and platform patterns to uncover exactly where JBL was under-discovered and AI lacked confidence in surfacing the brand.
This analysis revealed a new frontier: algorithmic trust. To earn it, JBL rebuilt content from the inside out.
Every asset now runs on two levels:
Editorial content answers the real questions people ask ChatGPT. Product comparisons and use cases are formatted for summarization inside AI responses. Social video integrates searchable language and structured signals that algorithms can crawl, connect and elevate.
Project Surround Sound is a new content system built for machine-mediated discovery. It’s designed for a world where a recommendation, human or AI, is the new search result.
JBL activated the system when it mattered most, across Black Friday and Cyber Monday, launching the world’s first holiday shopping ecosystem built for LLM-driven discovery. Social-first video, AI-structured gift guides and machine-legible product storytelling worked together across platforms as one unified surround-sound engine.
The results hit at full volume:
Project Surround Sound establishes a new model for discovery in the AI era: scalable, repeatable and built for the future of commerce.
This time next year, most brands will scramble to execute a pivot on search. Not JBL.
JBL is already where the action is.
