We went to brightonSEO expecting new answers. We came home with something more useful: proof that “nobody has this figured out,” as Alyssa Felix put it, and that the brands who win in AI search will be the ones who stick to the fundamentals.
Validation Is the Real Value of a Conference
You go to a conference hoping for a breakthrough. But as Mike Witham said, “A lot of the value that came from going to Brighton SEO was in validation, that we are either doing the right thing or that we are already ahead of the curve in a sense.”
Validation works both ways. One speaker claimed brand sentiment across the web had a negative correlation with sentiment in AI search. We dug into the data behind that claim, and it didn’t hold up. Positive reviews and sentiment across the web shape how AI describes your brand for the better.
Clear Context Beats Clever Tactics
Entity mapping came up again and again. The idea is simple: brands, people, and products need clear context so AI knows what they are.
Yamaha is a perfect example. “They make pianos and dirt bikes,” Alyssa said. Grant Simmons made the same point with Homer. Some people think of the Greek poet. Others think of Homer Simpson.
Mapping each entity to the right topics removes that guesswork. Or, in a line Alyssa credited to Grant: “brands don’t lose out to competition necessarily in AI search, they lose out to confusion.”
Schema Is a Map, Not a Checkbox
Schema split the room. Martha from Schema App framed it as a map that connects the dots across a site. Others treated it as a checklist item that doesn’t do much.
We know why that happens. Teams want something tangible to test, so they add basic schema to a few pages, see no change, and give up. But Martha shared that her team saw hallucinations stop after implementing schema. That result is easy to miss if you only track rankings. Schema works when you know the topics you want to own and what you’re measuring.
Attribution Was Always Messy
Teams want the clean line from rankings to traffic to revenue that SEO used to promise. That line is gone. Alyssa offered the better point: “maybe we never really did.”
Paxton Gray explored this with Rand Fishkin on a recent episode of The Campaign. Rand pulls marketers back to a core principle: if you do one thing, another should grow.
Real buying journeys are tangled. Alyssa recently bought a car she’d been thinking about for seven years. Some touchpoints came from search. Many didn’t. There is no single source of truth, so the answer is to pull from many.
Pick the Prompt Tracker That Fits Your Process
brightonSEO’s sponsors were link building companies and AI prompt tracking tools. Nothing else. We’ve demoed nearly every tracker, and one speaker said it best: “just pick one of the tools. They’re all the same.”
We chose ours based on how it structures prompts and reporting, not on data quality. The right tool is the one that fits how you already strategize and build.
Directional Data Still Wins Budget
Leaders still need evidence to take to the board. That evidence starts with the prompts you track. Build a prompt set around your buyer persona: what they worry about, hope for, and search. The data won’t be perfect. Prompt tracking is directional at best, and you have to get comfortable with a bit of gray area.
It works. For one enterprise client, overall organic traffic was down. But queries tied to the brand and the product line we optimized showed massive increases across the board. That’s a story leadership can act on.
AI Can Write Infinite Content. Bots Still Have to Find It.
The best talk came from an ex-Google engineer named Philly. He skipped links and content quality to explain how Google finds and indexes your site. When a site blocks crawlers, Google slowly de-indexes the whole thing.
That focus matters now. Anyone can produce unlimited content at the push of a button. What’s left is how that content gets delivered to bots.
Mike traced every major traffic drop of his career to one cause: “Google can’t find your site.” Sam Torres added a simple rule for JavaScript: if something matters, put it in your HTML too.
Off-Page Gets You in the Room. On-Page Gets You Chosen.
Third-party mentions pull you into the competitive set. Your own site decides whether you’re picked. “Off page gets you there, but then like on page is kind of how you get differentiated,” Noah Dansie said.
Off-page effort should follow the LLM, not the hype. Be where the model learns. Sometimes that’s a niche forum your audience trusts, which is far easier to earn a mention on than Reddit.
The Human Strategist Still Matters
A session titled “Technical SEO Is Dead” stirred the room, but its point was that AI can’t replace the human strategist. Chima’s advice on AI content was even shorter: “Don’t be dumb.”
No one has AI search solved. But the brands that know their audience, give AI clear context, keep their technical house in order, and publish work only humans could write will win.
About Alyssa Felix
Alyssa is a Search Marketer at 97th Floor, where she helps enterprise and high-growth brands navigate the shift from traditional search to AI-driven discovery. With deep expertise across technical SEO, answer engine optimization, and AI search visibility, Alyssa specializes in helping clients understand and win within evolving search surfaces. Known for pairing rigorous data analysis with clear, client-facing strategy, she helps brands turn AI search presence into measurable, revenue-driving results.
About Mike Witham
Mike is the Head of Search at 97th Floor, where he has spent the past eight years leading SEO strategy and performance for enterprise and high-growth brands. Based in Lehi, Ut. he specializes in building data-driven search campaigns that achieve bottom line results for clients. With his ability to create holistic, full funnel marketing campaigns, Mike helps teams turn organic search into a highly profitable, revenue driving channel.
About Noah Dansie
Noah joined 97th Floor last year, bringing his digital marketing specialization from Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Business as well as his holistic understanding of marketing from the multiple industries he’s worked in already. (Fashion with TAFT and Kizik, Beauty and Cosmetics with Dime Beauty, Consumer Goods with SharkNinja, and Leadership Consulting with FranklinCovey). Noah has expertise in helping marketing leaders identify the best way to approach what’s keeping them up at night in their marketing activities that aren’t getting the job done, and wouldn’t recommend any other fulfillment team than 97th Floor’s very own when it comes to digital challenges.
