Charlie Clark shares that as we move towards an AI search-first world, brands should move beyond "links for links’ sake" and focus on semantically relevant brand mentions that align with key topics and entities, helping AI engines better understand, associate, and prioritise them in results.

Talking points include:

What’s an example of links for links’ sake?

How do we focus on semantically relevant brand mentions?

How do we measure the success of semantically relevant brand mentions?

How do we ensure that semantically relevant brand mentions align with key topics and entities?

Why does this help AI?

How do we measure success?

Following on from Aleyda’s advice to optimize for citation-worthiness, Sukhjinder Singh shares that brand recognition is key.

Sukhjinder says: “Say goodbye to rankings and hello to recognition. It's time to appear everywhere.”

Why is it time to say goodbye to rankings?

“It's not a complete goodbye, but it’s changing your mindset. We're still comfortable with tracking ranking positions as one of our main metrics, and it should be one of our metrics, but we need to become more comfortable with appearing in different ways and broadening our idea of what it means to be discoverable.

We should be focussing on things like brand mentions, entity strength, visual content, and all the different ways that you're surfaced in the SERPs and the more conversational interactions across platforms.

It's broadening that idea and getting out of the comfort zone of tracking the top 10 ranking positions. Even now, that has been made more difficult with Google's change to pagination and how tools are picking up information from beyond position 10.

It’s not a complete goodbye, but it’s time to open your mind to other ways of tracking brand recognition instead.”

We all know that one of the most effective forms of SEO is to create a resource that garners natural links. A big part of brand SEO is to build a brand that people want to talk about.

Aleyda says: “Optimize for citation-worthiness.

This is easier said than done. It's about establishing yourself as an authority in your field, but in order to do that, you have to make it very clear what your unique selling proposition is and create and optimize your assets and web presence accordingly – both within your own website and externally as well.

We have heard so much regarding how LLMs are getting citations from social media, and all of these features are giving visibility to Reddit, YouTube, etc., so we need to put some content out there. However, a lot of those conversations aren’t thinking about the alignment with your product, your brand, your USP, and what actually matters business-wise.

Time and time again, we have seen how Google updates have negatively affected the rankings and the traffic of topics that are too shallow, too broad, and are not aligned with the subject matter expertise and uniqueness of the brand. We have also seen a lot of comments saying, ‘Because of the Crocodile Effect, it's no longer worth targeting broader informational queries,’ which I also think is too simplistic an approach.

The truth lies in the middle. What actually matters is the angles, topics, or specific areas that you can cover as a brand. The topics that make sense business-wise won't be fulfilled by generic concepts, and will incentivise the potential customer to learn more about your brand.

It's still worth targeting, not only because it will maximise the chances of a click, but even if it doesn't end up generating a click, it will be worth it just to be visible, because that will help the user make their decision later on in the process.”