Why Brand Signals Are Becoming the New Authority Layer

A panel of SEO professionals at WordCamp Europe recently discussed how AI is changing search and what businesses should do to remain visible. While they sometimes disagreed about whether AI changes SEO or if this is just another stage of its evolution, they largely agreed that success increasingly depends on four key fundamentals that are true to both AI and organic SEO.

Alex Moss, Principal SEO at Yoast SEO Pam Aungst Cronin, owner of Pam Ann Marketing and Stealth Search and Analytics Jovana Smoljanovic Tucakov, Content and SEO Lead at Melograno Ventures David Cuesta, founder and CEO of AMDSEO.es. Host of the panel: Kacper Bartoszak ( LinkedIn )

AI Is Changing SEO, But Not Everyone Agrees How Much

The context of the first question to the panel was within the context of the recent announcement at Google I/O that the search box was transitioning to an "intelligent Search box," which means that it easily transitions to AI Mode or AI Overviews. The question was if that changes anything for the WordPress community and for SEO.

AI Is Changing SEO, But Not Everyone Agrees How Much is where brand work becomes machine readable. Consistent third party evidence, clear entities, credible pages, and a stable narrative help search systems understand what the brand should be trusted for.

Screenshot Of Alex Moss of Yoast SEO

Alex Moss planted his flag on the idea that the fundamentals of content and human facing considerations still hold. "Scaling content is a really good example. If …you're questioning how much to scale, you shouldn't be doing it.

And if anything, you should be just doing, as Google say, unique quality, non commodity content intended for humans. Agents know that they're not the end user, they're just a gateway to the end user, which is the human. So it still has to adhere to some of those rules." Google's Danny Sullivan recently discussed how it may not be a good strategy to rely on commodity content.

Screenshot Of Alex Moss of Yoast SEO shows why AI search is becoming a budget and measurement problem, not only a visibility topic. Teams need to keep SEO fundamentals working while building a clearer view of assisted demand, attribution gaps, and revenue impact.

SEO Is Becoming Harder To Separate From Marketing

The panelists were aligned on the point that SEO is becoming increasingly connected to branding, marketing, and overall business visibility. Several panelists argued that success in AI search depends on a broader set of signals than rankings and keywords alone. Jovana Smoljanovic Tucakov lead this part of the discussion: "I feel that before, SEO teams and SEO specialists were really looking like niche things and looking to SEO like just one part of the puzzle and they were not looking the entire picture of marketing. This connects with Brand Signals Are Rewriting the Authority Stack when the same signal needs a clearer operating decision. A useful companion note is AI Recommendation Sets Leave Some Brands Out, because it looks at a nearby part of the same system.

And today, I believe that in order to do good SEO, GEO or whatever and be included in AI generated answers, you need to look at SEO and marketing as a whole. So you need to approach it as like brand strategy, product marketing, SEO tactics we were already using, but just like upgraded on much higher level. And I am very optimistic about that because that makes me happy because SEO is finally getting the place it deserves."

Screenshot Of Jovana Smoljanovic Tucakov

Even in the early days of SEO, SEO always felt like it should be merged with marketing. As early as 2004, I was engaging in brand building for B2B software companies because a company that counts Fortune 500 companies as clients can't be doing link exchanges, a popular tactic in those days. So I had to be creative, and I found that many brand building strategies I pioneered for these companies were effective for growing a small company to a point where it could have an IPO.

Brand Is The New Backlink

Pam Aungst Cronin agreed with that assessment, remarking that many people are saying that SEO is changing, but she insisted that SEO has always been evolving. She described GEO as a layer built on top of traditional SEO rather than a replacement for it.

Screenshot Of Pam Aungst Cronin

Then she started talking about the importance of branding for SEO and AI search: "But the other and I think biggest part of that new layer is the branding. Because if you think about it, we used to optimize for traffic, and well, we still do. But when the user doesn't have to do the click to find the information and synthesize the information themselves, when the AI is doing that for them, we're really not chasing or shouldn't be chasing the clicks as much anymore.

We should be chasing the citation being recommended by the AI summary of the information that's out there. And that's where it gets so much broader, like you're saying with the branding. My thing I'm telling everyone now is, brand is the new backlink.

Businesses Need To Be Easier For AI To Understand

When the discussion turned to practical advice, the panelists focused on a common theme: Businesses need to make it easier for AI systems to understand who they are, what they offer, and why they are different from competitors. The recommendations varied, but they consistently emphasized accuracy, consistency, and clear differentiation. Data integrity refers to how clearly information is presented.

The less work AI systems need to do to interpret it, the less likely they are to produce inaccurate answers. That concept he was talking about is also known as disambiguation, where you take action to make everything about a web page less ambiguous, from the semantic HTML to the headings, content, and site structure, also known as site architecture. Jovana Smoljanovic Tucakov focused on product positioning.

Businesses Need To Be Easier For AI To Understand turns local SEO into an evidence problem. Location pages, services, reviews, categories, photos, and profile data need to reinforce the same answer for a specific local need.

Human Experience Is Becoming More Important

The panelists repeatedly returned to the idea that AI systems are becoming better at identifying generic content and rewarding information that reflects real world expertise. That led to a discussion about Google's emphasis on experience and why firsthand knowledge may become one of the hardest signals for competitors and AI generated content to replicate. Pam Aungst Cronin pointed to Google's addition of the second "E" in E-E-A-T as evidence that experience is becoming increasingly important.

She argued that many businesses misunderstand Google's emphasis on experience. She said that adding an author biography is not enough. Instead, content should contain firsthand observations, projects, events, examples, and experiences that explain how expertise was acquired.

AI Search Visibility Tactics

As AI search becomes more important, a growing number of tactics have emerged that promise to influence AI generated answers. The panelists largely rejected the idea that long term visibility can be achieved through shortcuts, although they differed on whether some promotional tactics can still provide value. Jovana Smoljanovic Tucakov said businesses should stop looking for ways to trick search systems and focus instead on quality, products, users, and marketing.

Pam Aungst Cronin used Reddit as an example. Rather than viewing Reddit's visibility as a loophole, she argued that Reddit succeeds because it contains authentic human experiences. AI systems often seek original information sources rather than recycled summaries.

AI Agents Could Become The Next Search Interface

The most speculative part of the discussion focused on what search might look like five, ten, or even fifteen years from now. While the panelists had different predictions, they generally agreed that AI agents are likely to play a larger role in discovery, research, and decision making. Pam Aungst Cronin predicted that AI agents will increasingly handle research, comparisons, and transactions on behalf of users.

In that future, websites may function less as destinations for people and more as interfaces for software agents. Alex Moss argued that the future depends heavily on context. Consumers may be willing to let AI purchase routine items, but larger purchases involving significant money, risk, or personal preference will likely continue to involve direct human evaluation.

AI Agents Could Become The Next Search Interface sits between marketing and implementation. A brand can have strong positioning, but if agents cannot crawl, interpret, or complete the journey, visibility may fail before analytics records the demand.

Takeaways

The panel's central takeaway is that SEO is not disappearing, but it is increasingly merging with branding, marketing, reputation, and user experience. The panelists agreed that businesses that build recognizable brands and publish genuinely useful, experience based content will be better positioned for both traditional search and AI driven discovery.