Why it matters:
- AI-powered chatbots and search engines are increasingly becoming the first place consumers turn when researching products or companies. Traffic to e-commerce sites driven by AI assistants surged 4,700% between July 2024 and July 2025.
- Against that backdrop, video-sharing platform Vimeo has taken steps to help businesses create videos with AI-powered posting, editing, and language translation tools.
- Now, small business owners are tapping into Vimeo, which boasted 1.4 million paid subscribers with over 100 million videos uploaded and 50 billion video views in 2024, to create and embed content on the platform to drive discoverability, Zoe Black, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Vimeo Self Serve, told CO—.
For its 2025 State of Video at Work report, video-sharing platform Vimeo surveyed 1,000 business leaders and found that, for organizations of all sizes, “video is no longer a peripheral tool but a core strategic asset.”
Businesses today, the report notes, are trying to figure out their video strategy at a time when the video landscape “is undergoing a seismic shift.” AI tools are making it easier to create video content, and AI-powered search and chatbots are changing how consumers research products and companies.
For small business owners and businesses in general, “in order for their content to be discoverable and relevant in this new AI era, it’s super important to have video content, and also have video content that is searchable” by AI-powered chatbots and search engines, Zoe Black, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Vimeo Self Serve, told CO—.
Vimeo’s Self Serve team is focused on helping individuals and small and medium-sized businesses use Vimeo’s video platform.
Vimeo, founded in 2004 and headquartered in New York, was originally created as a way to share short videos directly with friends. It quickly developed into a popular platform for independent filmmakers, and it gave creators a place where they could have control over their content. In recent years, it has focused on business uses of the platform. During the pandemic, Vimeo saw its members and revenues surge, and in 2021 it went public.
We have a lot of small business owners using Vimeo to create content—and then embed content on the website to drive discoverability.Zoe Black, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Vimeo Self Serve
Vimeo now granting access to AI platforms like ChatGPT because they’re ‘prioritizing video content more and more’
In September 2025, Vimeo announced that it has entered into an agreement with Milan-based tech company Bending Spoons to be acquired for approximately $1.38 billion.
Bending Spoons, which also owns file transfer service WeTransfer and video-hosting platform Brightcove, said when the deal was announced that it plans to invest heavily in Vimeo, and to continue “to release powerful and responsible AI-enabled features.”
The LLM (large-language model) chatbots such as ChatGPT and AI-powered search engines like Perplexity and Gemini are getting better and better at interpreting video content and using it for answers and recommendations.
Previously, Vimeo blocked LLMs from accessing its publicly shared videos because there was no way to keep it from being used to train the LLMs. Now, as LLMs have allowed platforms such as Vimeo to specify that access be limited to indexing and be blocked for training, Vimeo has unblocked its public videos so they can be searchable by LLMs.
In August 2025, Vimeo began allowing ChatGPT and Perplexity to index its user content.
That is important, Black said, “because a lot of the LLMs are starting to prioritize video content more and more.”
“We know video is becoming more and more important in terms of relevance and ranking in the context of LLMs and search, so creating a lot of video content is a really important [business] tactic,” she said.
[Read more: 5 Consumer Trends Shaping Spending Patterns in 2025]
A shifting search landscape ushers in the rise of GEO
The shifting search landscape means that brands that used to obsess over SEO (search engine optimization) are now asking how they can improve what is being called GEO (generative engine optimization) or AEO (answer engine optimization).
Software company Adobe reported in August that traffic to e-commerce sites from generative AI sources surged 4,700% between July 2024 and July 2025.
Adobe also reported that shoppers who come to a site following a generative AI prompt are more engaged and more likely to make a purchase.
Salesforce, in its 2025 holiday forecast, reported that the percentage of U.S. consumers who started their shopping search with AI chat assistants rose 38% between May and August of this year, and that 87% of shoppers who use AI said they trust AI recommendations.
‘We have a lot of small business owners using Vimeo to create video content to drive discoverability’
Content linked to domains with videos are being referenced in a growing number of answers by LLMs, Black said.
“We have a lot of small business owners using Vimeo to create content—and then embed content on the website to drive discoverability,” Black said.
An advantage to using Vimeo for a company’s video content, according to Black, is that when a Vimeo video is embedded in a website, all the traffic generated by LLMs goes back to the company’s website, not to Vimeo, unlike other videos that drive traffic back to the video-hosting platform.
Vimeo, Black said, has been investing heavily in AI tools to help its users post, edit, and manage content. It has launched AI translation so captions and subtitles can appear in multiple languages.
Last year, it began offering its larger, enterprise customers voice translation, with AI voice cloning that replicates the original speakers’ voices. A similar feature will be offered to Self Serve users later this year, Black said.
The new feature will mean “people can translate their videos, not just via the subtitles and captions, but the actual spoken language,” she said.
Vimeo also is launching “multi-modal search,” Black said, which gives users the ability to search videos via context (“cq”) rather than text. For example, she said, someone would be able to ask, “show me all the scenes in this video that have inclement weather, and it pulls up those scenes.”
“Imagine your company has a bunch of internal training videos and content,” Black said. “And you want your employees to easily find the videos that have specific context (cq) in them. It’s a very easy way to find all those relevant videos,” she said.
It can also be used in marketing, where a video could be embedded in a website and someone could ask “show me the scene where x or y happens,” Black said.
“From an internal standpoint it helps accelerate knowledge sharing within the company, but then externally it could also help customers find information more easily,” she said.
[Read more: How AI is Leveling the Beauty Industry Playing Field for Small Brands]
In the new age of search, small businesses must ‘be video first’ to get discovered
One tip Black has for small business owners is to think about the types of questions your customers are asking on search and LLMs and make sure you have content that answers those questions.
She sums up her top advice for small businesses in the new age of search as “be video first.”
“At the end of the day, as a small business what you care about is getting discovered. You need clients, you need to make money. The more we can help our small businesses and our creators make money—put money in their pocket—the more valuable we can be to them in helping them achieve their goals,” Black said.
CO— aims to bring you inspiration from leading respected experts. However, before making any business decision, you should consult a professional who can advise you based on your individual situation.
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