From branding to visibility: A practical playbook for earning citations in AI and Google
Jonjo Rowlands, Founder of Jelly, explains why brand will be the most critical SEO asset in 2026 and how search visibility is evolving in an AI-driven landscape.
Starting from first principles, he shows how keyword intent shapes platform choice and why AI search doesn't replace Google but reshapes how users discover information.
He introduces a practical framework—the Four Ts —encompassing technical optimization, trust signals, topical authority, and talkability—and demonstrates how brands can earn citations across Google, AI Overviews, and answer engines.
The session addresses AI SEO myths, emphasizes the importance of human voice in content, and explains why strong branding matters more than ever.
Let me introduce you to everybody who's watching on YouTube here. John Joe. He's an experienced SEO digital marketing strategist. He brings a wealth of knowledge from years of helping brands improve their online visibility and performance. Known for his insightful, practical approach. He combines technical experience and expertise with a relatable communication style making complex SEO concepts accessible and actionable. And I certainly appreciate that, especially where we're going in the deeper wells of AI ranking and performance. So, we need some of those analogies and metaphors, John. >> That's it. >> I'm going to hand it over to you. This is your presentation. Go for it. >> Amazing. Can you see that now? >> Gotcha. >> Amazing. Cool. So, I'm going to be talking Yeah. Cool. Brilliant. Nice. So, my name is John Jones. So, I'm really happy to be here. I'm happy to be invited along today to talk about branding and visibility, which I'm sure you was aware is a very hot topic in the SEO world at the moment. Um, so a tiny
little bit about me. My name is John Joe. I'm founder of Jelly, which is a digital marketing agency based in Portsmouth on the south coast of the UK, which is very cold and rainy and horrible at the moment. Um, but I've been in digital for over 15 years now. So, you can believe me when I say that I have definitely seen my fair share of changes in the industry. And this is another big one that we're going through at the moment. Um, and I often get asked to speak at industry events, particularly around SEO and behavioral science. So, if this was an in-person event, I would ask for a show of hands, but a huge number of people on LinkedIn and on YouTube and other platforms all trying to sell you this dream, I think, of automating your entire business with AI as if it's some kind of miracle platform, which is obviously nonsense. And I love AI. I do think it's a brilliant tool when used in the right way. But I feel the need to differentiate myself, I think, against the kind of bros who are trying to shill some kind of AI automation tool against what I want to do today. So, I'd like to start by letting you know that I certainly don't have a giga prompt for
chat, whatever that means. I don't promise some spammy ways to publish 2,000 articles in one click or indeed any of the other too good to be true, clickbaity types of videos and articles on LinkedIn that you might have seen over the years. And this is just a tiny proportion of the ones that are out there. My advice generally is to ignore all of these kinds of SEO and GEO now bros or anyone who says SEO is dead or anyone who's trying a little bit too hard to make GEO a thing. So let's get into it. Now I want to start in a slightly unusual way today. I want to go back to the absolute basics because I think that is the only way that we can properly understand what's changing now that we're living in the age of AI search. We're going to go right back to the beginning and talk about how SEO works in super simple terms. So, every traditional search always starts with a user wanting to find some kind of information. Whether that's a a question or they want to find a product, they're just looking for something. Then
they go to Google, they type in a keyword and Google then searches this vast database for what it considers the most relevant sites for that particular keyword. and it displays them in a SER which stands for search engine results page and then the user then chooses a result from the list and lands on the web page. Now this is how it works with everything keywords. So the keywords are of course the words or phrases that people type into Google in order to find what they're looking for. And there are a vast range of different types of keywords. Sometimes it's just one word, sometimes old phrase, sometimes a question. Keywords come in all shapes and sizes. Um, in the early days of SEO, as I like to call the glory days, you could just put a keyword on the page 50 times and call it a day. That's when I used to have an easy job. You can't do that anymore. Google's obviously a lot more sophisticated now. Um, and that means that SEO's quickly learned that individual keywords don't tell the whole story. What really matters actually is the intent behind them. So, we have this
concept in in SEO of keyword intent. basically need to understand what people are actually trying to achieve with their search. There are four main types of keyword intent. They are navigational, commercial, transactional and informational. And we need to understand what each of these mean. So navigational is looking for a specific resource or a specific website or page. Um because nobody goes to a browser and types www.fas.com. You just go to Google, type Facebook and you hit the top link. So keywords like that we refer to as navigation and it could be for example it could be your brand name. They're just looking for your website and that's it. Then commercial keywords are research before making a purchase. And obviously that could be a product or a service. Basically anyone who is looking to buy something down the line and they're researching and comparing before they make a decision. So an example would be best SEO agencies. They're obviously looking to compare the different options that they've got. Then transactional keywords are when
people are ready to make a purchase or take an action now. So keywords like buy coffee online I put here is a good example of that. They're not looking to compare anymore necessarily. They're actually ready to part with some cash now. And then finally we haveformational keywords. And these are your who, what, where, why, how question type keywords. An example would be what is a canonical tag? They aren't looking to necessarily engage an SEO agency. is looking to learn about the topic or answer a question and there are the four main types of keyword intent and individual keywords they can be in multiple categories the lines blur but broadly those are the four types of intent so yeah so until recently every type of keyword intent was dominated by one player and that obviously was Google they had this kind of monopoly but what we're seeing now is a diversification in the types of search engines that people are using and obviously there's always been players like Bing and Duck go things that they're still traditional search engines. So for simplicity, I just call them Google. That's basically the same thing. And but what we have now
is not just people potentially choosing an alternative search engine, but people going to different types of platform entirely for certain types of keyword. And if you listen to the LinkedIn hustlers, you might be inclined to believe that the modern search landscape looks a little bit like this. In reality, that's not true. It's not as simple as people are searching on chat GPT now. It's way more complicated than that unfortunately. Um so firstly, Google still absolutely eclipses chat GPC in terms of overall search volume. Um also the reality is that search engine choice depends on keyword intent. And that's the whole reason why I wanted to look at the keywords and the keyword intent is because it's not as uh simple as people are trying to make out. It looks in reality a lot more like this. um certain types of keyword are still very much dominated by Google and I think they will be for the foreseeable future. Um navigational keywords is a primary example of that because nobody is going to chat GPT and type in Facebook login as a quick way of navigating to Facebook. It's just not
happening and it probably never will. Um and equally there aren't very many people going to chat GPT and just type in buy coffee online. Although obviously OpenAI very much working on that. They would like that to be the case. But you might go to Google, you also might very well go to Amazon for that kind of se search intent. But what we do see is for commercial andformational keywords, different types of search engine are becoming a lot more important. If people want to learn about a topic, people seem to be growing more and more comfortable with using. So yeah, so I was just about to say that this Christmas I'm supposed to be cooking roast goose for nine people. I've never cooked goose before. I've only ever done turkey. Um, years ago I might have Googled that and read an article. Now I go to Tik Tok and watch a 30- secondond video because it matches my intent far better. So the point that I want to make by saying that is that this isn't actually particularly new. Um, SEOs like me have been dealing with this type of thing for years and years now. Um, so one way to determine the value of a keyword is by looking at search volume. That's roughly how many
people search for it per month. And as an example, 15,000 people a month roughly search for the keyword, how old is Taylor Swift? And once upon a time, that would have been an extremely valuable keyword to rank number one for, right? Because people would click on your link, visit your site, and find the answer, and you could monetize that through ads. Nowadays, that keyword despite being searched for probably just as often is practically worthless because when you click it, when rather when you search for it, you get the answer directly in the results page. So, you never click on a website. And of course, that's called a zero-click search. It's been happening for years now. And so, us SEO SEOs, we know a thing or two about operating in a postclick era. And broadly, it just means we need to focus on different strategies, which I will go on to explain. So that's a highlevel overview of what's happening I think in search at the moment and the next thing we need to talk about is why brand. Why am I saying that the most important thing for SEO in 2026 will be your brand.
Well the main reason is that search engines love brands right and because um and I think for good reason if you think about it. Um, so Google's goal, like any company, is to make as much money as possible. And in order to do that, they need to keep people coming back to the platform. And in order to do that, they need to give people what they want. And what people generally want is results that they can trust. Um, we've found that users are far more likely to click on and be satisfied by a website that they recognize than an unknown entity because culturally brands, they are sort of a shorthand for credibility and quality. So over time when all the data comes in, Google has aligned its algorithms to favor established authorities. It's about as simple as that. Now it's worth saying that this doesn't mean that you have to be Coca-Cola or Nike in order to rank in Google because brands come in all different sizes, but branding is really important. And the way Google measures this is through a metric called site quality score. It was about a year ago
now, I think, a Google exploit was discovered by Mark Williams Cook and it gave us incredible insight into this. If you haven't already, I urge everybody to watch this video all the way through because it is absolutely excellent and it goes into this into some detail. But the part that we're particularly interested in today is how Google decides on a quality score for your site. And Mark found that there were three main factors. Those are anchor text relevance across the web and how often your brand name appears in anchor text on other sites. Um, next is user interactions and that's particularly so how often people choose your result in search even when you don't rank in position number one. And then how often people search for your brand by name. So essentially I think this is how a measure of how famous your brand is within your niche. So hopefully I've convinced you now that brand is incredibly important for SEO. Um, so now we're going to look at what you actually need to do in order to get ahead in 2026. And the good news is that you've been, if you've been doing solid
SEO, I think you're 95% of the way there, because nobody should be tearing up their existing SEO strategies. Um, the main reason for that is because most of what people are calling GEO and AEO, etc., etc., is what we've been doing for years in SEO anyway. Um, but there are some specific best practices that you can implement now that will dramatically, I think, increase your chances of being cited in answer engines as well as in traditional search. And at Jelly, we call these the four T's. They are technical optimization, trust signals, topical authority, and talkability. And I'll explain what each of those means. Now, we'll start with technical optimization. So the main thing to remember I think is that both humans [snorts] and bots are visiting your website. So Google and chat you can see they all have bots that crawl your site but the humans and the bots they're not seeing the same thing. Humans see what's on the left and the bots are much more comfortable with what's on the right. Um that means we
need to present that information to the bots in a way that they can best understand and read it. First thing we obviously need is uh fast accessible code. And one way you can test this is by using SE Rankings website speed test tool. So you just need to go to the link here, type in your website address, and it will test your page and give you a score out of 100. 90 plus considered good. Most sites, I think probably in the 60s or 70s, and if it's anything under that, that's a sign you have some kind of issues that you should probably address with your developers. That's a really good tool. Uh, and then the next thing I want to talk about in terms of technical optimization is schema. And for those who might not know, the best way I can describe schema is that it's I I call it like Google language. It's code that helps search engines understand context. So, as a human, you're pretty good at understanding context. If you see a number on a web page, you can usually tell whether it's, for example, like a price or a phone number just from visual cues and
experience. And to be fair, robots are pretty good at this, but they can make mistakes. So what we do is we use schema to explicitly tell the robots exactly what everything is and it sits in the back end of the site so no human ever sees it but it helps the robots understand you a little bit better. Now schema has traditional SEO benefits and the main one is that it makes your site eligible for rich results and rich snippets in search. So a normal result might look like this. It's just a link meta description and that's it. Really boring. Um but a rich result on the other hand can have images. It can have star ratings. It can have pricing data, a whole range of other things that make it far more likely that your site will then be clicked. Um, but there are also now, I think, branding benefits to schema as well. Um, and the reason for that is because it helps to establish your business as a unique entity. So, it might, for example, prevent Google from confusing you with other companies maybe that share a similar name, things like that. And there's a really cool tool that you
can use to understand what entity information Google holds about your brand. So you just go to the link on the left or use the QR code and you put in a keyword. So you might put your name, you might put your company name and you'll get a nice list of all the entities that Google knows about that are related to that keyword. So it can be really useful to put your brand name in there and see what Google understands about it and make sure that it actually agrees with rel. So, we know schema is super important and to test um whether you have a schema on your site in the first place um or if it's good enough, you can use my handy schema extractor tool using this link um so you just paste that into your um paste your web address into the tool and what it will do is scan the site, extract the schema, and you can then analyze it um and see what you've got on there. And it's also a really good way of looking at your competitor's schema to see if there's anything that they're doing that you might then want to emulate. Um, if you don't have any schema or if there's more schema types that you think you should add, reach out to your web developer and get that sorted because it's a really, really
good win. Now, you may or may not have seen on LinkedIn, etc. talk about implementing a specific file for LLMs called LLM.txt. Um, my advice broadly at the moment is that it's not worth worrying about. Um, because all the major AI platforms have said that they don't use it. Um, and I implemented one on my website. Um, and I can see from the server logs that it hasn't been accessed a single time. it's just simply not being used. So, it's not going to hurt, but it's also not worth the effort right now. Just not worth bothering with. So, that's technical optimization. It's always been important, but I think today it's more important than ever in the kind of new world of SEA. Next up, I want to talk about trust signals. So, trust signals include things like reviews and accreditations and awards or anything that confirms to the humans and also to the bots that you're a real and reputable business. Um, and the more consistent and verifiable these signals are, the more confidently both users and of course the machines will trust your firm. For a long time now, it's not been
enough to say we offer this service or we sell this product or write a blog that says this is what this thing means. You have to actually show your receipts. You have to prove it. You have to prove that you are authority on a topic. And it's even more important if you operate um within YM, which stands for your money or your life. So that's basically any site that deals with topics like health care or finance, they're held to a much higher standard in Google. Um, and as they should be because if Google gets it wrong, there could be real world consequences. But it's important for all sites. And by the way, one thing that never gets mentioned when we talk about trust signals is you do actually have to have good content in the first place. You have to actually be an authority on a topic. So the tips I'm going to show you are totally useless if you don't have that as the bare minimum. Um, so I'm going to assume your content is great. I'm going to look at how we can get Google to notice that properly. Firstly, we have third-party reviews. And it doesn't have to be Trust Pilot. Any third party review platform will do will do. But the key is that it does have to be, I think, a third party
platform. Testimonials that you publish on your website that you directly control are pretty much worthless in the eyes of bots because you could obviously write anything and give yourself five stars and just make that the reviews. You should be sending your customers review review requests as standard in order to build up your reviews. And I always recommend where possible, I know it's hard in the first place just to do this at all, but it's where possible to spread them around and to different platforms. So not all your reviews live in one place because if you lose your Google business profile, for example, which does happen, I've seen it all the time, and your reviews are all on there overnight, they could be gone. So build reviews in multiple places if you can. And next, you really, really should be implementing an upto-date meet the team page. Um, at bare minimum, it should have a decent photo of everyone, preferably all in the same style, a little bit about their expertise and something um a lot of people forget is a link to their LinkedIn profile because that acts as social proof. It's um much stronger signal than just writing this
person is an expert because it proves that it's a real person with real expertise. And then finally, we have author blocks. Every single blog post that you publish on your site should have an author attributed to it. Um, and it's often overlooked and it becomes even more important now because chatbt is a thing and uh, creating content in general is easier than ever. So when bots are crawling that content, they need to quickly work out what's actually worth listening to and what is low rubbish. Having a specific expert attached to an article is one of the best ways to signal that this is quality well-ressearched content with the caveat being that it does actually have to be quality well-ressearched content. You can't just slap an author block onto some AI slop and expect anything to happen. Now, that only really scratches the surface of all the possible trust signals that you should be considering. So, what I've done is I've put together a free trust signal checklist that you can use to audit your site and it's got hundreds of possible trust signals for you to look into. So you just go through the list, give your site a pass or a fail for each one, and you'll end up
with a long list of actions and ideas that you can use to improve your site. So that's trust signals. It's a really, really important factor in modern search. Next up, we're going to talk about topical authority. So topical authority is um I like to call it the depth and consistency of your expertise on a specific subject. It's built by covering a topic comprehensively um rather than just sort of on a surface level. So answering every single question that somebody might have on a topic. That means rather than having just a a single landing page on a topic and calling it a day, you need to build a complete cluster of related content on the topic in order to show rounded expertise. Um search engines and now AI models recognize these patterns and eventually they learn to associate your site with that topic which in turn makes you viable source whenever it's mentioned or queried. So, the first thing you need to know in order to cover a topic fully is what are people actually asking? So, let's say that you are a Christmas tree retailer. Um,
you've built your website, you've got a solid landing page selling your Christmas trees. Now, you need to round out your authority on the topic of Christmas trees. And to do that, we need to do some keyword research. So, your first port of call is obviously going to be SE ranking. Um, I don't have enough time today to go through a full keyword research strategy, but broadly speaking, our goal is to map out a cluster of related subtopics and to use that to create new content on our site. So, we're looking at all the different types of similar keywords, related keywords, and all the questions that real people are actually asking and want to know. So, if we're that Christmas tree firm, we have our rocksolid landing page for Christmas trees at the top. And from there, we look at all the questions that people have related to Christmas trees. we might then be able to group those into three broad pillars. So here I've put the species of Christmas trees um caring for your tree and maybe then queries around sustainability and that side of things and then we can start to create the content within those clusters and through internal linking we start to build and grow our authority for the
overall subject of Christmas trees. Quite often I talk about these things with clients as a necessary evil. don't really want to start publishing pages and pages about the difference between Norman fur and Norway spruce and things like that but it's a necessary evil but we have to do that in order to prove that we're experts on this what we actually really want to rank for which is selling Christmas trees so that's topical authority and it's really really important now for owning a topic and for getting it cited in things like AI overviews and finally we have talkability now this isn't I don't think really the best name for it but it's the best I could think of because it had to start with a T, but essentially this is being part of the conversation or being talked about outside of your website. And it's really the final piece of the puzzle as and probably the hardest part of the puzzle. Um, so up until now we've been talking about things that we can achieve on our own sites. So pretty much we can do what we want. Um, but now we're talking about things that happen on other platforms and other websites that we might not have direct control over. So it becomes much more difficult.
And these they are some of the strongest signals to search engines that you're an authority. Um and the reason is well of course we're going to say that we're experts on topic but if you can get third parties to back you up is a much much stronger message to search engines and to humans. Um I'm sure everyone's aware of the importance of things like backlinks of other websites linking to you. Um Google sees that as essentially a vote for your website and it's for much the same reason. It's a third party backing you up. So firstly I want to talk about citations. So a citation in this context, it's a structured listing of your business details online and it helps to confirm to the crawlers who you are, where you're based, and essentially that you are real and trading. Um, and generally speaking, the more you have, the better. Examples are your Google business profile, directory listings, but also don't forget your social media profiles. They also count for this. And to make sure you have them set up, make sure you post them regularly. There are some best practices for citations. The most important one is this. Keep your NAP data identical everywhere. So NAP
stands for name, address, phone number. Um it's really important to keep it consistent across every touch point. So for example, um if your name is ABC solicitors and all your directory listings have different versions of that, it's sometimes difficult, remember when we were talking about entities earlier, it's difficult for search engines to actually consistently link them back to you. And so much of the benefit of them could be lost if it doesn't necessarily see those as the same thing. So make sure you search your brand name regularly and make sure that any mention of you is consistent and you choose one and stick with it. So the next thing we need to do is make sure that you list on as many credible platforms as possible with credible being the important part there. Um, so generally the more listings you have, the better because in in the eyes of Google, the more visible you are on a number of different touch points, the more real and established you look. But there's no value in being on platforms that themselves have no credibility. So start with the main ones. Start with the Google business profile or Bing places directories like Yel in the UK. And
don't forget industry specific ones as well. There's lots and lots of really really good ones in every single little niche. And then finally, we need to be as active as possible with posting. Um, so on socials, but also on your Google business profile. Um, which I know it's easier said than done, especially if you're a smaller brand because there just aren't enough hours in the day, but it is really important because businesses that are active will always be prioritized and regular posting is one of the best ways I think to signal that. And then finally, there are mentions. So mentions um are it's something you can't directly control because basically it's other people talking about you online and unless you're Apple or Coca-Cola, it's really difficult to consistently achieve. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you some of the best practices because if you can do it, it will put you miles ahead of your competitors, especially if you're a local brand. Um and it's definitely the hardest part. Um but we're going to try. So the first thing to do is encourage conversations
about you. So the easiest and most obvious one is to encourage reviews. So everyone should be doing that as standard, but also encouraging conversations on socials and on forums like Reddit. Um it's not easy because it takes time and it can definitely backfire, especially Reddit. It's one of the most cited sources for AI information. So being active on there can be a huge win. And I do appreciate that it's easier for some brands than others, but it is possible for loads a much wider range than people realize. For example, I find for hospitality brands, it's pretty easy, I think, to generate conversations. You just go to your local town subreddit, um, post about dinner recommendations, then with another profile, we recommend your restaurant or hotel. Easy peasy. But obviously, it's a little bit sneaky sneaky, and it I mean, it does happen all the time, but it's a little bit sneaky sneaky. And it's also very possible that it could backfire because Redditors, they will not hold back if they sniff out marketers. Um, so often a better way I find is to just be upfront and to create a branded profile and just join the conversation naturally without being overly salesy, without spamming
every single thread, just adding genuine value to the conversation. If you do that, you probably won't go far wrong. And then we have local and industry coverage. Basically, this is just digital PR. So the goal is to be mentioned as much as possible by credible sources. And again, not every business is going to be able to regularly send press releases and just get loads of local coverage, but it's really powerful if you can do it. And I genuinely believe that there are ways of doing this for any business, [clears throat] even like the really boring ones. Um, so for example, I once helped this really dry, but cool, really dry IT management company get local coverage by running a um like a digital skills session for a local school. and then they'd send a press release and they got good coverage and they got the all important backlink and it's really really low effort. Um, and finally, a nice easy one, you should be making the most of any content that you do produce. So, for example, if you do publish a blog post, you should also be posting it on your Google business profile, on LinkedIn, and as many other places as
possible online. Um, and even encourage your employees to do the same if you can. So, make the most of the work you do, and it'll get you far more value out of it. So, those are the four T's of search visibility in this new AI era. And it's really just a reframing, I think, of traditional SEO. Nothing I've spoken about today is really that new. And that's because what's working hasn't really changed all that much. It's just the framework and the environment that we're working in has changed. But I hope that's given you lots of things to think about. And I guess any questions? >> All right. Hey, thank you, John Joe. That was a great roll through of trust and credibility and and citation needs that all brands need. Hey, real quick question before I go over to QA's uh engines like Perplexity and Chat GPT atlas foreground citations. Which asset types would most reliably earn those citations? Original data, expert commentary, comparisons, or FAQ hubs? Any thoughts?
>> Yeah, I I think it's still very similar to the playbook that we had before. we just want to be creating as much content as possible. Um, it's slightly changed. You can't run a business now um like you used to be able to that's sort of, you know, purely blogging focused um and and sort of um and using that type of model that you used to be able to do. It's not the same as that anymore. It needs to make sense in the context of the wire as a business and it needs to make sense within the pillars that you've got. Your services are the most important thing and the pillars need to lead out. But I still think there's room for be creating as much content as possible. Absolutely. Absolutely. Got a question from the audience here. Uh John Joe, which brands brand signals should teams prioritize in 2026 to ensure their credibility carries into AI generated answers while still preserving the brand's unique human tone? >> Unique human tone. I think that's one of the key things actually and the the human tone because I see anybody who works in digital marketing and looks at a lot of websites will start to
recognize the chat GBT voice um and it's got a certain type of words and phrases and it's a semantic style that you just notice time and time again when you start clicking through. So having that kind of human connection I think one of the things I almost think of this as part of my manifesto for 2026. SEOs need to understand and um realize that branding is part of their job. Um and they need to understand and read the brand guidelines and realize that they are every single piece of content. It's not branding content and SEO content anymore. It doesn't work like that. Everything is all one thing. Um and so every single piece of content that you produce has to be on brand and has to have that kind of voice because people are becoming wiser. It's not just us in uh sort of digital space that are seeing it all the time. We I see it all the time in comments and um on anything is this looks like it was written by chat GBT. People are becoming wise to it. So yeah, that is a really really important part of the uh the question there. The unique human tone make sure that you are
speaking as the brand and always listening like you're from the brand >> and that pres that presupposes that they have a brand guideline. If they don't clients or agency what have you, they got to develop that, right? >> Absolutely. Yeah. He's one of the really really important tools that everybody should really understand. I always think of brands as people. And if um it's almost like you're roleplaying as a character. Would my character say this? No, they wouldn't. They would say it in this way. They would say in this way. It's um I think that's just a nice sort of frame and a mindset to be in when you're thinking about brands. >> Absolutely. Last question. Uh and thank you Jacob Miller for that question from Shauna Guillar. What do you make of the fact that AIO's seem to have split YM L healthcare has some of the most AIOs while finance has some of the fewest. [snorts] >> Yeah, I think this is one of the most dangerous things about AI search in general. Um the fact that there are we all know that um AI platforms every
single one of them still hallucinates to some degree and measures been put in place. it's to I I don't think it goes anything close to far enough especially for Y and Yale topics. Um healthcare is probably the most important one. There are there have already been situations where people are putting really important um healthcare type topics into AI overviews and getting results that just e either aren't true um or that are sort of almost true. It's almost quite right but it's just not and it can be dangerous. And so I think that that is something where we need to see more guardrails in place for those types of topics. Um and um I I I think broadly that's what we're going to see because Google is is widening what it refers to as YML. We've seen that last year there was an update where sort of a wider section of topics are coming into that category. They take this kind of thing seriously but I think are just trying to rush out AI overview so quickly come to take out some of the ground that they lost when chatbt and open AI started sort of getting ahead in the AI space.
They needed to quickly rush out their product and I think that has meant that we've had um situations where things are rushed out now. But yeah, it needs to come back and it needs to have more guardrails in place because it will affect people's lives. People will put um something in there and something will go wrong. We've always seen the kind of like jokey ones where it say something obviously, you know, silly and someone will post it to LinkedIn or onto Instagram or whatever and we'll have a laugh about it. But when it's actually something serious, then we need to take this kind of stuff much more seriously. >> Absolutely. Well, John, thank you so much for your presentation today. I really do appreciate the time and the information that you've got in your deck. These videos will be available for everybody in post. Thanks so much, Matt. We'll uh keep on going.
Key takeaways
Chapters
Q&A
Jonjo recommends creating as much content as possible aligned with your business pillars and services; content strategy must make sense in context of the business, not just pure blogging, and should lead outward from core services. — Jonjo Rowlands
Preserve human voice and avoid ChatGPT patterns; SEOs must understand brand guidelines and ensure every piece of content is on-brand with the brand's unique voice, treating branding and SEO as one integrated effort, not separate functions. — Jonjo Rowlands
Jonjo expresses concern that AI hallucinations pose serious risks in YMYL topics, especially healthcare; he calls for stronger guardrails in AI platforms and notes that Google has been widening YMYL definitions to include more sensitive topics. — Jonjo Rowlands
Quotes
“I don't have a giga prompt for ChatGPT, whatever that means. I don't promise spammy ways to publish 2,000 articles in one click.” — Jonjo Rowlands
“SEO has quickly learned that individual keywords don't tell the whole story. What really matters is the intent behind them.” — Jonjo Rowlands
“Search engines love brands. Google's goal is to keep people coming back to the platform by giving them results they can trust, and people are far more likely to click on a website they recognize.” — Jonjo Rowlands
“Branding is part of the SEO job. Every single piece of content that you produce has to be on brand and has to have that kind of voice, because people are becoming wiser to content that looks like it was written by ChatGPT.” — Jonjo Rowlands
“AI platforms hallucinate, and guardrails need to be much stronger, especially for YMYL topics like healthcare. When something goes wrong, it can affect people's lives.” — Jonjo Rowlands