I've been coming to Brighton SEO for over a decade now. Not quite long enough to remember it as just a gathering in a room above a pub, but certainly long enough to remember the buzz of Google+ and ponder if it was going to be important. Spoiler alert: It wasn’t.
The thing I love about Brighton SEO (apart from the seaside location) is that whether you’re fresh into the industry or you’ve been around the block a few times (ahem), you’ll always come away with actionable insights, and that really is down to two things:
- Consistently great industry speakers
- An ever-evolving industry
That means there’s never a shortage of new topics to cover.
At Brighton SEO 2026, however, there was an overall acknowledgement that we’re no longer in just a fast-paced industry; we’re in one that is changing at lightning speed, and one where the rulebook is being written and ripped up on an almost daily cycle. Why? You ’ll get no prizes for guessing AI.
Here’s how that is showing itself across SEO and the wider digital marketing landscape.
Five key insights from Brighton SEO 2026
1. Earn trust, and visibility will follow
I started the day listening to Erin Simmons discuss the increasing power of community. She argued that we look to people, not platforms and algorithms, when uncertainty is high. And right now, uncertainty is about as high as it gets.
AI is rewriting how people find information, how they evaluate it, and who they believe. In that environment, community is where trust organically surfaces. And trust-driven visibility, she argued, will outlast any individual platform.
For a closer look into the power of trust to build visibility, check out our Christmas influencer campaign – the power of built trust and community saw almost 1.3m impressions for Mitchells & Butlers’ Premium Christmas season.
“It’s always been about trust. That’s why micro-influencers with small, loyal communities can be even more effective than massive personalities with millions of followers. But now that we’re losing that personal touch to AI, it’s never been more important.” - Beatrice Galloway, brew account manager.
2. Less than 3% of websites are ready for what's already here
Alex McKenna told us that less than 3% of websites give AI tools the labelled data and structure they actually need to understand and surface them in queries.
After 25 years of optimising for humans using traditional search engines, we now need to implement strategies based on what we know large language models (LLMs) need. These LLMs are now making decisions about which brands get mentioned, recommended, and trusted at scale.
Brew’s position is clear. Our technical director, Adam, led the charge on a raft of updates to our web platform that made AI-readiness a reality straight out of the box.
The message: label your data, build the structured layer, and gain some control over how AI summarises you – because if you don't, it will do it anyway. Then, years of careful brand building can get compressed into whatever pattern it finds.
“Structured data isn't a technical nicety anymore. It's the price of visibility.” - Adam Cox, technical director.
Find out more: AI Discoverability: How to Write Content LLMs Can Understand
3. Audiences are more fragmented (and lazier) than ever before
Becky Simms’ team surveyed 10,000 people about how they actually search for information online. The headline numbers are ones you might have already seen floating around: Google search usership down 9%, Gemini up 12%, 54% of 18-24-year-olds now using TikTok as their primary search tool.
But the numbers aren't really the point. The point is what's underneath them.
Becky shared a framework breaking search behaviour into four drivers:
- Crowdsourcing
- Taste tuning
- Fact-finding
- Autopilot
These sit beneath personas, not inside them.
The same person uses different platforms for different types of intent, and the platform that wins each time is the one that delivers cognitive ease.
Not accuracy. Not depth. Ease.
"People don't want the best answer. They want a good enough one, faster."
That's a hard sentence to swallow for people who have spent careers helping brands produce the best answer. But she's right. And the implications are significant. If you're designing your content strategy around producing definitive, comprehensive resources, but you’re not labelling that content for modern search, the opportunities to be found and surfaced as a trusted source are few and far between.
And then there was this: "Trust is built through the messenger, not the message."
I really liked this thought, the idea that who tells your story matters as much as what the story says.
“Brand voice, user-generated content (UGC), influencers, and media; these aren't interchangeable. They carry different trust signals to different people. At this point, you need to understand – and potentially use – them all.“ - Maxine Catley, brew paid social media lead.
What are we doing?
We’re no strangers to persona mapping with clients, diving deep into character traits, consumer behaviours, and digital preferences. However, we'll now also be looking to include this new framework of search drivers into future sessions to really nail down the exact reason a person is searching, and how to get them from point A to point B as quickly as possible.
4. AI uses patterns, not truth
Sean Barber, SEO Manager at Macmillan (and worth following on YouTube: Search with Sean), tackled a big issue: AI gets things wrong.
Another speaker shared that AI needs three sources to present the same information for it to consider it fact. And, in the context of Your Money, Your Life, that has real consequences.
The comparison he drew was memorable: AI is like Einstein. Enormous amounts of knowledge, capable of incredible things, but also able to make simple mistakes. The difference is that Einstein knew when he’d (for example) burnt his toast. AI often doesn’t tell you when something is uncertain, instead presenting it as gospel.
AI summaries compress caveats, exceptions, and nuance by design.
That's a feature for some content categories. For health, finance, and legal topics, it's a liability. And with 66% of people now regularly using AI for personal, work, or study reasons, this isn't a fringe concern.[1]
What are we doing?
We’ve incorporated AI visibility into our auditing processes, not just to understand how often our clients are surfacing for relevant searches, but also to gain valuable insight into how their brands are presented when they do appear.
5. Visibility awareness without a strategy is just noise
Daniel Liddle noted that $1.5 billion has been invested in SEO and AI visibility tools that provide very little useful information presently; we’re still defining what good looks like, and very few tools give more than just a snapshot, with no real action.
He went on to talk about your true feasibility to be visible in AI search and posed five questions he urged us all to answer before even starting to try and gain visibility:
- Do you have the expertise to answer this better than anyone else? If anyone can write it, there's no reason to surface you.
- Do you actually change what people think or do? Citations follow credibility. There’s no shortcut to true credibility. Can you provide something that will genuinely shift user behaviour?
- Are you consistent across every platform an AI system can learn from? If your brand only exists on your own website, it barely exists at all, something echoed in earlier talks.
- Can any discovery system actually read you? If your site is heavily JS-dependent, LLMs can't render it. You may be invisible to the systems you're trying to optimise for.
- Can you prove that any of this is working? Attribution is how your team earns its seat at the table. Think about what success metrics look like and how you’ll measure that.
Ranking is no longer the goal. Recognition is.
Ashley Liddell’s talk was somewhat of a call to arms around organisational structure when thinking about ‘search everywhere’.
Search, historically, has been a retrieval problem. Crawl, index, rank. We built entire careers and disciplines around that model. But a SERP click is no longer guaranteed.
You can rank number one and be invisible, pushed below AI mode, local results, featured snippets, and product carousels.
Ranking is an increasingly obsolete metric. Recognition is the new challenge.
He outlined his signal stack:
- Foundational signals: Your about page, brand description, and mission. If these are weak, everything else collapses. They should always be reinforcing your brand and proposition.
- Distribution signals: Where you show up beyond your own site. Socials, UGC, creators. He made a point of calling out Substack specifically: "Don't sleep on Substack."
- Authority signals: Evidence that you should be chosen. Mentions, backlinks, endorsements, review signals.
- Reinforcement signals: The ‘stickiness’ layer. Consistent content cadence. More mentions over time.
These work as a system, not as independent levers. He noted that “this is an operating system.” Your organisational structure is working against you if you continue to operate in silos. Recognition doesn't work in silos.
“This is where your core brand foundation – values, mission, and your why – come into play. If you don’t have your own voice and a clear reason for existing, how can you set yourself apart?” - Ryan Noble, brew content specialist lead
What are we doing?
We're always striving for actionable insight, and our AI visibility tool is just the first step. The tool shows you where you're showing up in search results (or not) and how, and our digital marketing experts join the dots from insight to meaningful action.
Brighton SEO 2026: Final thoughts
Joining the dots from these Brighton SEO 2026 sessions, one thing was very clear: The old blueprint for good SEO isn't wrong, it's just no longer enough.
The fundamentals of expertise and credibility still matter, but where you build that, how you structure content for LLMs without losing that focus on humans, and how you distribute this across an expanding set of surfaces is the biggest challenge we now face.
If you look after a brand in 2026, there is almost certainly work to do.
Need help navigating the AI landscape? We’re here. From auditing AI visibility to crafting LLM optimisation strategies, we can help drive real brand growth. Let’s have a chat.
Reference
[1] KPMG: Trust, attitudes and use of artificial intelligence: A global study 2025
Sophie Page-Britton
Sophie is an account director and SEO specialist. She's led the way on global brands such as All Bar One and Me & My Golf – combining her natural charm with her eye for insightful stats.
