There’s a question that brands keep asking in 2026, and most of them are asking it wrong.
The question they ask: “How do I rank higher in AI search?”
The question they should be asking: “Why would an AI tool recommend my brand to someone who’s never heard of me?”
These sound like the same question. They’re not. The first is about optimization. The second is about trust. And the gap between them is where most brands are losing ground right now.
Two conversations I had recently — with Greg Digneo, founder of Content Guppy, and Matthew Slaymaker of Slaymaker Marketing, both guests on the Unscripted SEO Podcast — map out exactly what builds that trust, and why it starts with the same asset: a credible expert willing to be on the record.
How AI Tools Decide What to Recommend
LLMs — the systems behind Google’s AI Mode, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and every other AI search interface — don’t rank websites the way traditional search engines do. They generate responses by synthesizing information from a wide range of sources, weighted by a combination of factors that have more in common with editorial judgment than keyword optimization.
The brands that show up in AI recommendations consistently share several characteristics: they’re mentioned across multiple trusted sources, their subject matter experts are quoted or cited by credible outlets, their brand name appears in contexts that associate it with genuine expertise, and their content demonstrates a point of view that couldn’t have been generated by AI alone.
Greg Digneo, whose agency has been tracking brand visibility signals as a core part of their SEO approach, flagged a piece of research in our conversation that makes the mechanism concrete. Garrett Sussman at iPullRank studied Google’s Personal Intelligence feature — which draws on Gmail inbox data when users opt in — and found that brands present in enough inboxes had a meaningfully higher probability of appearing in Google’s AI Mode recommendations.
“If you’re not doing email marketing because you’re like, ‘I’m an SEO and I shouldn’t be doing email marketing’ — this might make you reconsider. You have to be doing all of it. The old model of four blog posts and eight links a month just isn’t going to get it done anymore.”
The mechanism is the same one that makes journalist placements valuable: consistent brand presence across trusted sources creates a signal that AI systems recognize as authority. The brand that shows up in newsletters their audience reads, in editorial pieces their audience trusts, quoted by experts their audience follows — that’s the brand that gets recommended when the AI is asked for a solution.
Why Technical SEO Optimization Doesn’t Create This Signal
Matthew Slaymaker approaches search from an integrated paid-and-organic perspective, which gives him a useful vantage point on what’s actually driving outcomes versus what’s driving reports.
His observation: brands that saw significant organic traffic drops over the past year often found their actual business metrics — leads, revenue, conversions from organic — holding flat or even improving. The traffic that disappeared wasn’t converting anyway, because it was built on content that no credible source would ever cite.
“People will see ‘our traffic and SEO has declined 30% over the last year’ but their metrics are the same in terms of leads and revenue driven from organic. It’s really a lot to do with the fact that they were just ranking for content that wasn’t actually driving any results for them long term.”
The content that survived — the content that kept converting as AI overviews absorbed informational traffic — was content built on genuine expertise. The how-to article with a generic answer got absorbed into AI summaries. The case study from someone who actually did the work, the analysis from someone with proprietary data, the perspective from someone who could only know what they know by having done what they’ve done — that content held.
Technical SEO optimization — proper heading structure, page speed, schema markup, internal linking — is a prerequisite for being considered by search engines. It is not a mechanism for creating the kind of trust signal that makes AI tools recommend a brand. The optimization gets you in the door. The expert gets you recommended.
What “Being on the Record” Actually Does
There’s a meaningful difference between content that cites an expert and content that is an expert’s perspective.
When a subject matter expert is placed with a journalist, the resulting article doesn’t just mention a brand. It establishes an association between the brand and a specific area of expertise, in a publication that an audience already trusts, with a journalist who validated that the expert was worth quoting. That chain of credibility is what AI systems are synthesizing when they generate recommendations.
Greg’s agency runs a structured onboarding process that extracts this expertise before writing a single word of content — interviewing the subject matter expert, the sales team, and current customers to build a proprietary knowledge library that no competitor can replicate through AI prompting:
“We don’t start an article without saying: what do these folks think of this subject? What are the stories they’ve already told us? What do the customers think? Then we have all this data, and we can write the article around that stuff.”
The article that emerges from that process has something that no AI-generated average does: a specific point of view from a specific person who can be quoted, cited, and verified. That’s exactly what journalists are looking for when they need a source. And it’s exactly what AI systems weight more heavily when generating recommendations.
The Compounding Brand Signal
Matthew’s integrated marketing framework — what he calls the “kraken model” of brand tentacles extending into every relevant channel — makes the compounding nature of this signal clear.
When a brand’s subject matter expert appears in a trade publication, that generates an editorial citation. When they appear on a podcast, that generates a transcript that AI systems can draw from. When they’re active on LinkedIn, that generates a body of professional content associated with their name and brand. When they’re quoted in newsletters, that generates inbox presence that may influence personalization signals.
None of these touchpoints in isolation is transformative. Together, they create the kind of distributed brand presence that tells an AI system: this is an entity that real people in this space recognize and trust.
Greg frames this as the core strategic shift every SEO should be making right now:
“Branded queries are the key indicator that says the other stuff is working — that you’re increasing whatever share of voice metric you want to look at. Visibility is the new SEO.”
The brands building this kind of AI-visible authority aren’t doing it by optimizing content for AI. They’re doing it by putting credible experts in front of credible journalists, consistently, across the channels their buyers trust. The AI recommendations follow from the accumulated signal — not from any direct optimization for AI.
The Practical Question for Brands
Both Greg and Matthew arrived at the same practical question from their different vantage points: not “how do we rank in AI search” but “who in our organization knows something that’s actually worth repeating — and where are we putting them in front of audiences?”
That question leads directly to journalist placement as a core marketing strategy. Not as a link building tactic, though links are a useful byproduct. Not as a PR exercise, though brand awareness is a welcome outcome. But as the primary mechanism for building the kind of distributed, editorially validated brand signal that makes an AI system confident enough to recommend a brand to a stranger.
The expert who can answer a journalist’s question authoritatively, consistently, and on the record is the most valuable marketing asset a brand has in 2026. The question is whether that expert is accessible to the journalists who are looking for them right now.
Drawn from conversations with Greg Digneo (Content Guppy) and Matthew Slaymaker (Slaymaker Marketing) on the Unscripted SEO Podcast. The Greg Digneo episode is available to listen here and watch on YouTube.