In October 2008, Google's Eric Schmidt gave some SEO information that went a little beyond the standard "Write good content" mantra that Google and SEO researchers tend to harp on (I know I'm guilty of it too.) Here is a quote from Schmidt to a bunch of magazine executives from that time.
"The internet is fast becoming a "cesspool" where false information thrives. Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool ... Brand affinity is clearly hard wired. It's so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away."
Read "the internet" as "the training corpus" and Schmidt is describing the problem a model has when it decides whose answer to repeat. The mechanism is the same one sixteen years later: where a system cannot verify a claim on its own, it falls back on who is making it.
That is why authority is the signal we spend most of a budget on, and the one that takes longest to move. It is also the reason the SEO work and the digital PR work stopped being separate services here.
If Google likes established brands, then they'll cut out a lot of dodgy sites. But, will big brands always mean non-threatening, vanilla content? Brands don't necessarily answer searchers' needs, and there is no guarantee that big brands equal quality content. Quality can often be found in smaller, newer sites that have not had the time to establish themselves.
The caveat aged better than the prediction. Big brands never did take over the results, and much the same is true of AI answers today. The citation tends to go to whoever answered the question most usefully and most checkably, which is often not the largest company in the category.
This is the part of the current market we would argue with. A smaller site with real subject depth and a named author can be cited alongside a household name, and we have watched it happen on client sites. What it cannot do is get cited while staying anonymous.
It would be hard to overestimate the importance of unique content. If your site's content can be found on a dozen other sites, you're not going to get links. You'll get the most mileage out of content that presents a new view of things or new data. Remember that link building is a constant process. It isn't something you do one time and forget about. Put unique and relevant content first, and work the links in so that they make sense, and you'll have a plan that works for the long haul.
Written about links, and it describes citation just as well. A model has no reason to name you as the source of something it can find on a dozen other sites, and the pages that do get quoted are consistently the ones carrying a number or a finding that exists nowhere else.
Which is the uncomfortable part of the work. Most of what makes a page citable has to be produced rather than optimized, and that is a research job before it is a search job.
Businesses spend a lot of time and money in building a brand. From an SEO perspective, there are two reasons why you must focus on branding. Firstly, branded search queries are relatively easier to rank for. search engines, including Google, are likely to rank your website on top if it's your brand that the user is looking for. Studies also show that branded search queries have a higher CTR than non-branded queries.
There are however a few challenges to contend with. Because of the relatively lower competition that branded searches face, it is easier for competitors to influence the search user with content that disputes your business' claims. For example, a search for a query like "MailChimp" or "Salesforce" can show results containing reviews of these products that are put up by competitors. These reviews could undermine the product to show competing products in a better light.
The mechanism has not changed, only who is reading. When a model assembles an answer about a company it draws on much the same third-party pages a searcher would have found on page one, and a competitor's review page carries the weight there that it used to carry in the organic listing.
So the brand SERP is the first thing we audit on a new engagement. What sits on it is roughly what an AI engine will repeat about you.
Marketers have little trouble in ranking first for their brand search. However, you have nine other spots in the organic listing on Google that can be hijacked by competitors. To avoid this, it is a good idea to create company pages on authoritative third-party platforms. For instance, a search for "Hubspot" will show results from websites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Facebook and Pinterest that all point to profiles owned by Hubspot. This leaves little room for competitors to butt in with counter-claims about your brand or your products.
Written about ten blue links, and it turns out to be the cheapest available intervention on AI citation. Corroboration across independent sources is one of the things a model weights most heavily, and profiles on platforms it already trusts are the version of that which anyone can do inside a week.
The half that gets skipped is the second half of the original advice. A profile that exists but ranks nowhere is not corroboration, so those pages need links pointed at them like anything else.
Ideally, building up great text links should be a long term process. You may have heard the joke about the American tourist in England asking how they get their lawns so beautiful. The Englishman answers, "It's quite a straightforward process. Just plant it, cut it, roll it, and water it for 400 years." Links tended to in a long term fashion will turn out to be valuable, but most webmasters don't have the web equivalent of 400 years (which is probably about two years) to cultivate all those links.
The joke is doing real work there. Authority is a cultivation problem and it resists being bought, which is why the honest answer to "how long before we are cited" is measured in quarters rather than weeks.
We would rather say that at the start than at month four. A client who expects the curve is a client who is still there when it arrives.
Branded search queries do not stop with just the search for your brand name. Prospective buyers also lookup several other related brand searches pertaining to your pricing, reviews, and alternatives. Given the long-tail nature of these keywords, it is not realistic to rank for all these terms with just your homepage or third party profile pages.
Pricing, reviews and alternatives are also the three things people now ask a chat model about a company, phrased as questions rather than as keywords. The queries moved. The list did not.
Which makes those three the pages worth writing first on most engagements, ahead of anything aimed at the head term.
So why did Google start giving more weight to branding? Because there are tons of affiliate sites exploiting SERPs. They outrank established businesses and big brands. If you're a user, it's best to have the first SERP contain a combination of affiliates, big brands, and other sites to maximize your options as a searcher.
The affiliate-thin-content problem that prompted it has come back at a scale nobody in 2010 could have modeled, and the pressure on every engine is the same one: work out which of a million plausible-looking pages is worth repeating.
Every mechanic on this page is a response to that question. The engines changed shape and the question did not.
Content marketing is an effective strategy to tackle this issue. This refers not just to your blog content, but also your YouTube channel, Facebook posts as well as guest contributions you make on related industry blogs. With hundreds of such content pages, it is possible to rank prominently for your related brand search queries.
Similar to your website SEO, it is a good idea to build backlinks for all these third party platform pages as well. Google typically restricts the number of search results from any one domain to two per result. Building backlinks to all your third party platform content is a good way to get all these pages ranking for your long-tail brand searches.
The two-per-domain limit named there is the reason a brand cannot own its own results on its own. You need pages you do not control saying the right thing, which is the same constraint an AI answer imposes and the reason this work cannot be done entirely on your own site.
It is the least glamorous item on any plan we write and it is usually the one that moves first.
