In 2020, I moved from brand strategy into SEO and UX after over a decade of building and nurturing some of the most recognizable brands in various industries.
At the time, I thought of it as a significant shift between disciplines. Looking back, I was following a thread that had already started to connect them, and the signals were there well before “AEO” and “GEO” entered anyone’s vocabulary.
I want to walk through four of them, because together they explain why brand and SEO were never as separate as our org charts made them look. Then, we’ll attempt to answer the question of brand’s role in the age of AI-powered search and how organizations can integrate the two disciplines to win more visibility and favor from crawlers and searchers alike.
4 Clues That Told Us This Was Coming
In 2019, Google rolled out BERT, its natural language processing model. Before BERT, ranking was largely a matching exercise where the words in a query needed to resemble the words on a page. After BERT, Google could interpret what a searcher meant, even when their phrasing was imprecise or conversational.
That shift, from matching language to matching intent, started lifting the boundary between SEO and brand, something most of us didn’t realize at the time. Understanding intent means understanding what need a searcher has and which business is truly positioned to meet it — a brand positioning problem before it is anything else.
So, BERT made search more sophisticated than ever, and in doing so, it started to reward the clarity that good brand strategy has always required, whether or not a brand had ever bothered to define it.
The clearest clue came from Google’s API leak in 2024. Among the details that surfaced was confirmation that brand mentions carry ranking weight similar to backlinks, the same links SEO teams had spent years and thousands of dollars acquiring through outreach and PR.
And then there was the more subtle clue that had been sitting in local SEO for over a decade. Anyone who has managed Google Business Profiles knows that inconsistent name, address, and phone information across the web directly hurts local rankings. We called this NAP consistency and treated it as a technical hygiene issue. It was an early, narrow example of the value Google places on consistency. Today, if the same brand describes itself differently across the internet, from the official website to social media accounts, search engines lose confidence in what that brand is.
The final clue I’ll list is topical authority. This is where brand positioning and content strategy intercept to clearly communicate focus and the depth of expertise through a comprehensive online resource library (from landing pages to top-of-the-funnel content). This feeds Google’s knowledge graph, enabling it to place that brand with confidence in its domain.
There were other signs, of course, and all of them rooted in positioning, consistency, message clarity, trustworthiness, and a clear, defensible point of difference. My colleagues in brand will recognize these as core pillars of a good brand strategy. In the age of AI-powered search, businesses need one more than ever.
At its core, a brand is a system of meaning. It defines who a business is, what it offers, who it’s for, and what makes it different from every alternative in its category. That job used to belong to people – think customers forming impressions, employees repeating a story consistently, or journalists and reviewers describing a business in their own words. Increasingly, it’s a job brand strategy does for machines too.
AI-powered search systems read whatever definition of the business already exists across the internet. If it is missing or inconsistent, they have to guess.
Machines Can Only Recommend What They Understand
Imagine someone asking an AI-powered search assistant: “Which boutique hotel near the wharf feels local without being too casual for a client dinner?”
There’s no keyword to match here, right? The system has to work out what kind of hotel this even is, what “feels local” means in this context, whether any specific property is truly distinctive in that way, and whether that distinction shows up consistently across its own site, its reviews, and everywhere else it’s mentioned.
So, a list of keywords was never going to answer that question. This is where a brand with a clear, consistently reinforced identity has a real shot.
Here’s another example:
Picture a multi-location tutoring franchise I’ll call Crestline Learning Centers. Its corporate site describes the brand as offering “personalized, one-on-one instruction for K through 12 students.” Its franchisee websites, built independently over the years, describe the same service as “affordable tutoring for busy families.” Its social channels lead with a confidence-building angle aimed at parents of struggling students. Its Google Business Profiles list a mix of category tags, some accurate, some inherited from a template nobody updated in years.
Every one of those descriptions could be true and none of them contradicts another outright. But none of them agree on what Crestline is at its core either.
When a parent is searching “best tutoring for a child who struggles with reading and writing,” they are asking their search assistant to match a specific need to a specific, well-defined answer.
Google search result, September 2026
If Crestline’s own digital footprint cannot agree on its core positioning, the search experience has no clean signal to work with. It sees four plausible, slightly different businesses instead of one clearly defined one, and it will struggle to recommend a brand it cannot confidently describe.
This messaging inconsistency has become a structural gap in how discoverable the business can be.
Brand Legibility Is the New Job for Brand Governance
Most of the current conversation about “AI SEO” focuses on the technical layer, such as structured data, content architecture, factual accuracy, query fan-out. All of that matters, but it assumes that the brand has built its foundation on clear and consistent positioning and messaging. Structured data can’t fix a business that describes itself five different ways depending on which page you land on.
Brand governance now needs to answer a sharper question: can anyone, human or machine, read this brand clearly enough to describe it back accurately?
I call this brand legibility. It’s a different bar than visual consistency, and it requires brand teams to define and defend a small set of things across every channel:
- What the business is
- What it is not
- Who it serves
- What are the experiences, products, or services it provides
- What is it best known for
- What makes its offer meaningfully different from the alternative down the street
- The language customers use to describe the problem you solve
None of this requires repeating a tagline everywhere, which is the mistake many teams made the first time someone told them consistency mattered. It means that underlying facts need to hold steady even as the language describing them changes by channel and audience.
Yes, a franchisee page can sound different from a corporate homepage, but both need to agree on what the business fundamentally is.
Value Beats Voice, Even in Storytelling
Once you understand that AI search wants clarity, it’s easy to conclude that storytelling and personality are now liabilities in a way. It sounds safer to write in plain, literal sentences a machine can parse, and save personality for somewhere else.
I’d draw a different lesson from it.
The real problem with most brand storytelling was that it substituted adjectives for substance. It was never about personality. If I had a dime for every “elevated experience” and “unforgettable journey into extraordinary comfort…” all of which met the slash of the red pen (back in the day of pen and paper) because they tell the reader nothing they can easily grasp or act on.
Compare that to a sentence describing the same hotel like so: “Every room includes a private balcony facing the harbor, and the on-site restaurant sources seafood from the docks a five-minute walk away.”
That sentence carries personality and brand character, but it is also specific enough that both a human reader and a search system can understand exactly what makes the property distinct.
Value over voice. Always.
Bring Brand & SEO Under the Same Roof
Brand strategy used to operate upstream of everything else, where the brand team would define positioning and voice, document it in a brand book, and hand it downstream to whoever built the website, wrote the blog, or ran social. From there, brand’s job was mostly enforcement, catching deviations after the fact.
If brand legibility is the goal, we need to rethink the roles and this workflow.
This connective work also applies to product, PR, communications, and customer experience, since every one of those touchpoints shapes how a business gets described and understood. SEO is simply where the connection is most measurable, and the one I’ll focus on here.
Brand strategists need to understand digital… deeply. Otherwise, they will create brands that cannot translate across online channels, SEO included, effectively.
Brand strategists also need to be a part of content planning. Without brand’s involvement, content can drift from positioning without anyone noticing until an AI search system already has the wrong read on the company.
SEOs and content specialists need to have a say in brand building or refresh strategy. If it is to thrive online, brand needs SEO guidance to avoid inconsistencies between the old and new positioning that take months to untangle across hundreds of indexed pages.
What to Do About It This Quarter
If you lead brand or marketing at a multi-location business, here is where to start:
- Pull your last ten pieces of public-facing copy, corporate site, a franchisee page, a social caption, a Google Business Profile description, and check whether they agree on what the business is, who it serves, and what makes it different.
- Write down the three to five facts about your brand that should never change regardless of channel or audience. Everything else can flex.
- Ask your SEO or content lead where they last had to guess at positioning because brand strategy hadn’t defined it clearly enough. Their answer will tell you exactly where the gap is.
- Replace one piece of vague, adjective-heavy copy with a version built from specific, verifiable detail, and see whether it reads better, not just differently.
- Put a recurring meeting on the calendar between brand and SEO or content, even a short one. The goal is fewer surprises, not more meetings.
Google has described its own AI-powered search as using rich signals from users to link people with the brands and products that best match their intent, a direct statement that brand relevance now shapes who gets recommended. That makes brand consistency more than a communications discipline. It’s becoming part of the infrastructure a business’s discoverability runs on.
Brand Strategy Has Become Search Infrastructure
Go back to the four clues I opened with: natural language understanding, brand mentions carrying ranking weight, NAP consistency in local search, and topical authority built on a clear point of view. None of them are really about SEO. They are about whether a business can state clearly who it is, prove it consistently, and back it up with real signals of relevance.
That has always been brand’s job and the only thing that has changed is the audience. Brand teams used to build clarity mainly for people, their customers, investors, employees. Now they need to put the same kind of intentionality into ensuing their positioning is clear and accessible to machines too.
When budgets tighten, brand strategy is usually the easiest line to question. I’d argue that the tides have shifted. Brand strategy may be one of the more measurable, defensible investments a marketing budget can make, because its output now shows up directly in whether a business gets found at all.
Six years ago, I thought I was leaving brand behind to build a career in search and UX. I was building on it. Every project I’ve worked on since started with the same question brand strategists have always asked: who are you, and can you prove it? Search just started asking the same question, and it plans to keep asking it more precisely every year.
