I just spent two days at brightonSEO getting my brain thoroughly rearranged, and I'm still finding the pieces. Between sprinting across tracks, trying to score the coolest swag, and finding somewhere to charge my phone, all on pretty much no sleep, I came away with so, so many insights.
I came away with a lot of practical tests to try and new skills to try out! I’m really excited to try out a few things with my clients and test out some of the workflows and processes shared. However, it was also really nice to chat with like minded people and realize that we’re all just figuring things out still. Overall, and in no particular order, these are some of the main themes I got from the convention speakers!
1. Know your audience (yes, still, and always)
This is the takeaway that should feel obvious and somehow never stops needing to be said. One line from the Visibility track has been rattling around my head since: no one searches for the brand, they search for the problem. People don't think in keywords. They think in outcomes, in moments of their lives, in feelings…and our work should reflect that. "Users first, algorithm second" should not be one of those phrases that marketers just say but never actually do in practice. In reality it is the strategy, especially now that rankings follow people, not volume.
Volume was never really the strategy. It was the proxy we used because it was measurable. Now that AI is chewing through the messy middle of the buyer journey, that proxy is breaking down more and more and the actual thing it was standing in for(understanding what a human being is trying to accomplish) is what's left standing at the end of this AI search shakeup.
2. The new keyword research is the old keyword research (if you're doing it right)
Everyone's very excited about "keyword research in the age of AI" like it's a brand-new process.
It's not.
Like a lot of things in this new age of search, it's something old just repackaged. It's just demand intelligence. You still start with the customer. You still capture everything. You still categorize and cluster based on ICP. The only real addition is that now you're also building a prompt taxonomy, because people aren't just typing fragments into a search box anymore because they're having entire conversations with AI and not just searching.
3. Entity mapping is more important than ever
If there's one thing I haven’t been able to shut up about after this, its entity mapping. Like I understood its importance and did it before BrightonSEO, but now, I’m fully on board, invested, straight up its biggest fan.
So here’s the thing. Brands don't lose to their competitors in AI, they lose to confusion. Disambiguation and copy that is basically just marketing fluff cannot be your brand because it causes an identity crisis. Be exact about who you are, or the model will guess, and it may not always guess in your favor. I will absolutely be diving deeper into this one, so stay tuned for more content around it, because I have so many thoughts!
4. Don't write boring content
Basic content has diminishing returns. If you don't give a model context, personality, and a real point of view, it will happily average you into oatmeal. And sure oatmeal is nutritious, but guys, it's so bland if you don’t spice it up. So spice up your content.
The content that actually succeeds has more to offer than the content next to it. It goes and finds where it hurts, digs deeper into that pain, hints at a solution, and then gives people enough to actually take action . Layer in real external evidence. Earn the links by being the definitive piece on the topic, not one more summary of it. And let your internal linking do the work of keeping that content alive long after you've moved on to the next thing.
5. Your humanity is your biggest strength
This is the one that hit hardest, honestly. In a room full of people talking about automation, the most repeated idea was: don't let AI turn you into oatmeal (actual phrase from the speaker that I absolutely loved). Humans love stories. Your unique way of communicating with the world is not a liability in an AI-mediated search landscape — it's the entire point.
6. SEO isn't dead, but it is evolving
Somebody had a talk called “Technical SEO is Dead*” but the asterisk didn’t make it to a lot of the marketing materials. Let me tell you, a lot of SEOs were not happy about that. But in actually going to the session, the speaker was totally right.
A lot of the boring, checklist-style technical SEO work is getting automated, and that's fine, because it really should be. What's not going away is the part that requires actual judgment: people still have to make the hard calls, because AI may cheerfully choose a solution that isn't future-proof, isn't secure, or just isn't the right one for your specific mess of a legacy site.
7. AI Visibility can’t be solved by SEOs alone
True AI visibility won’t be achieved through website clean up or SEO tactics. It's not even something we can achieve because we publish good content on our site (even though that's still very important). It’s a full brand problem. We have to work across different departments and move together as a whole. No more right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. PR, Ads, website dev, leadership, social media, customer service,etc - they all need to be on the same page. And SEO has the data to help guide that effort.
8. Trust is more important than ever
We all know E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). And when we talk about it, we often lump every aspect of it together, but they’re not. Without trust, there is no E-E-A.
We have to build trust.
That's it. That's the whole game now.
The bigger picture
If I had to zoom out on all of this: SEO isn't being replaced, it's being asked to be what it was always supposed to be.
Marketing has always been something I've loved because it sits in this messy middle of understanding people, understanding data, and understanding technology. For years, it's felt like the industry kind of ignored the human part of that equation, because it's messy and touchy-feely and hard to put in a spreadsheet. Or we took shortcuts with our tooling (looking at you, JavaScript) just because we could, or because it looked cool. But now, we can't get away with that anymore. AI is putting a magnifying glass on every corner we ever cut, and it doesn't care how impressive our stack looks if the fundamentals underneath it are shaky.
So here's where I've landed: the brands that win this next stretch aren't going to be the ones with the fanciest AI tooling. They're going to be the ones who did the unglamorous work early— knowing their audience, mapping their entities, writing like an actual human, earning trust one review response and one accurate fact at a time.
None of that is new. It's just finally and undeniably, the whole job again.
(I packed a lot into this list, and honestly, most of these deserve way more than a paragraph each. Over the next few weeks we'll be digging into a few of these one at a time, testing some of the workflows I picked up in Brighton on real client work, and reporting back on what actually moves the needle versus what just sounded good on a slide. Stay tuned!)
