Brand SEO in the Age of AI: How to Optimise for Human + AI Search Engines in 2026
- Laura Derbyshire
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
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Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth.
If your brand disappeared from the internet tomorrow, would anyone - human or machine - notice?
Because that, essentially, is what AI-powered search is now asking. And unlike the old days of SEO, where you could quietly game the system with volume and velocity, AI search is far more interested in whether you make sense as a brand than whether you’ve followed a checklist.
Search used to reward whoever shouted the loudest. Keywords, backlinks, content churn - the digital equivalent of waving your arms in a crowded pub and hoping someone important clocked you.
Now search has grown a brain. It’s learned how to think. And it has stopped rewarding noise in favour of something far more inconvenient, and far more powerful: meaning.
If your brand doesn’t make sense - clearly, consistently, coherently - AI will step right over you like an abandoned coffee cup on the platform at King’s Cross, and it won’t look back.
Welcome to Brand SEO.
Search Isn’t Dead. But “SEO Content” Absolutely Is.
SEO used to mean writing long blogs that no one actually finished, repeating the same phrase until it lost all meaning, and calling everything an “ultimate guide” in the hope that Google might notice you.
AI-powered search has quietly but firmly put an end to that.
Tools like Google Search, ChatGPT and Perplexity no longer just rank pages. They summarise, recommend and filter, and in doing so, they decide which brands are worth listening to and which ones are politely ignored. They have no patience for vague positioning, generic messaging or brands that sound exactly like everyone else in their category.
The Thing AI Cares About (That Most Brands Are Still Ignoring)
AI does not care if your content is technically “SEO optimised”.
What it does care about is whether you actually know what you’re talking about, whether your brand sounds like it has one coherent brain behind it rather than twelve freelancers, and whether your content answers real questions that real decision-makers are asking.
In other words, AI cares if you have a point of view - and whether that point of view shows up consistently over time.
This is uncomfortable news for brands whose positioning could be lifted and dropped onto a competitor’s website without anyone noticing. But it's excellent news for brands that are prepared to think properly about who they are and what they stand for.
Why This Is a Huge Opportunity for Scaleups
AI search is not inherently biased towards the biggest brand with the biggest budget. In fact, it often favours the clearest brand - the one that explains things well, shows depth of thinking and stays close to real problems rather than corporate abstraction.
For scaleups and challenger brands, this creates a genuine window of opportunity.
Larger organisations are slower to move, slower to agree positioning, and often burdened by layers of legacy messaging. Scaleups, on the other hand, can move quickly, define their narrative decisively, and stay close to the sharp edge of what their customers actually need.
If you are quick to implement, disciplined about clarity, and committed to staying on top of this with fresh, strategically aligned content, AI search gives you a chance to outmanoeuvre much bigger competitors.
But clarity is everything. Speed without clarity simply accelerates confusion, and AI is extremely good at spotting it.
What Brand SEO in the Age of AI Actually Is (And Isn’t)
Brand SEO is not a plugin, a hack, a prompt or a task to quietly hand to the most junior member of your marketing team.
This shift is why brand SEO in the age of AI is becoming one of the most important strategic advantages a scaleup can build.
It is the discipline of making your brand legible to humans scanning at speed, to AI systems deciding what to trust, and to search engines choosing which voices to surface.
At its core, it answers one deceptively simple question:
Who are you, who are you for, and why should anyone believe you?
If that question is not answered clearly and consistently, no amount of clever optimisation will save you.
How AI Search Decides Who Wins
AI search engines are effectively doing four things at once.
They interpret intent, looking beyond the literal words to understand the real problem someone is trying to solve.
They filter out waffle because they have already read the entire internet and have no interest in recycled thinking.
They assess trust by looking for consistency over time rather than one-off bursts of activity.
They categorise you - whether you like it or not.
If your positioning is vague, AI will guess. And it is spectacularly unimpressed by brands that say things like “we help businesses grow”.
How to Optimise for Human + AI Search in 2026
This is not about doing more content. It is about doing the right thinking first.
You need to be clear on what you believe, what you stand for, and what problem you exist to solve - in terms a human (and an AI) can understand. You need to write as though you are answering real questions, not imaginary keyword briefs, and structure your thinking logically so your insight actually lands.
And yes, you need to repeat yourself, but strategically. Brand authority is built by saying the same thing, from different angles, over time, until both humans and machines recognise you for it.
The Part Most Companies Are Leaving Too Late
This is where the opportunity either becomes a competitive advantage or it quietly slips away.
AI search strategy is something you need to be looking at now, not in summer 2026 when your competitors have already trained the systems on their version of the category.
First, run a brand strategy session with your senior leadership team. This is not something to outsource or delegate downwards. This is about your north star, your positioning, and the language you want associated with your business for the next phase of growth. If you get this wrong, you will not avoid the work; you will simply have to redo it later, after you have already embedded the wrong signals into search.
Once that clarity is in place, work with a specialist SEO and AI search partner to implement it properly, or, if you have genuinely expert capability in-house, empower your team to roll it out consistently across your website, content strategy and blog plan.
Strategy sets the direction. Specialist execution makes it visible.
Ready to Get Ahead?
If you are a scaleup seriously considering how AI search will shape your visibility, credibility, and growth over the next few years, now is the moment to act while this is still an advantage rather than a baseline expectation.
At OSER, we start with strategy, working directly with leadership teams to define a clear positioning that AI (and humans) can understand, before partnering on specialist implementation that makes it stick.
If you want to explore what that could look like for your business, let’s have a conversation.
Book a call or get in touch via our contact form ->
Because in the age of AI search, the brands that win are not the loudest; they are the clearest.