Posted In: HOME by
Ant Kenny,
July 6, 2026
By Ant Kenny, Associate Director
On the 18th of June I spoke at our annual Home & Garden Conference about AI, trust and brand. AI and how it will shape marketing and how we discover brands has been of interest to me for a few years now so had been looking forward to it for weeks, and now that its been and gone I have this strange flat feeling you get when something you’ve been building towards for ages just disappears off the calendar. Anyway I digress, the talk seemed to go down well, and even the inevitable tech issue didn’t get in the way of what felt like great day all round.
Firstly if you were in the room, thank you for coming and listening and equally for the conversations I had. Secondly, for those who couldn’t make it, or you want to go back over the thinking, this is a follow up rather than a transcript of what I actually said.
The main point I wanted to get across was pretty simple and that is that AI isn’t just another channel you add to the marketing plan. It’s starting to change how people actually find, compare and choose between brands.
That might sound odd coming from someone with “Digital” in their job title or someone who forged his marketing career in SEO. Most of what I do day to day is search, content, performance, how brands show up online, so yes there are technical things to think about, things like content structure. schema, FAQs, product information, etc. All of it matters to some degree.
But the longer I’ve done this job the more I keep coming back to the same idea, which is that brand is usually what actually makes the difference. In my talk I mentioned how the consistent pattern I’ve seen in my 18 years + of marketing is that tactics change, platforms chang, search results change, algorithms change, user behaviour changes. But whatever’s working really well right now tends to get more competitive, or more expensive, or just gets copied by everyone else quickly, or just dies off, and that’s when you find out how much strength your brand had actually built up while nobody was watching.
That’s why AI has caught my attention so much. On the surface it looks like a digital shift however underneath it, I think it’s really a shift in brand and trust.
One trap that’s easy to fall into is talking about AI as though Google is going to vanish overnight. I don’t think that’s a useful way to look at it. Search isn’t going anywhere. Instead what’s shrinking is the amount of actual searching people have to do.
For years the journey went roughly the same way for most people and this was that someone had a need, they searched, clicked around a bit, compared a few brands, read some reviews, looked at product pages, maybe came back a few days later, then made a decision. AI is starting to reshape that and this is because more of the answer shows up inside the search experience itself now. More of the follow up questions happen in that same place, more of the comparing gets done by the system rather than the person doing it themselves, and over time, more of the actual decision will get taken on the user’s behalf too.
So it’s not really about “how do we rank” any more, or not just that. It becomes something closer to “when AI is narrowing the market down, are we even credible enough to be included.” Which is a genuinely different question to be asking.
This was one of the points I really wanted to land because a channel is usually something you switch on when you want it: paid search, paid social, PR, SEO, TV, affiliates, retail media, etc.. You pick it, you fund it, you shape the message, you push activity out into the market.
AI doesn’t really work that way though. It’s not just somewhere your brand happens to show up, instead it’s becoming more like a layer that sits over the whole market and interprets it for people. It looks across your content, your reviews, press coverage, comparison articles, communities online, search demand, basically every signal that exists around your brand, and then it decides what’s relevant and credible enough to actually surface.
So AI visibility isn’t the channel itself, it’s more of an outcome, the result of how well your brand is understood, trusted and backed up across everything that people and systems can see. That’s part of why treating AI visibility as purely an SEO problem feels a bit dangerous to me (I won’t get into to the Seo is GEO or GEO is AEO debate here). SEO still matters a lot, don’t get me wrong, its foundational setting but optimising your own content is never going to build the whole picture of trust that these systems end up weighing.
In a fairly traditional customer journey, brands get loads of chances to make their case. Your ads, your website, your product pages, your reviews, the sales process, emails, retargeting, the store experience, customer service. All of that still counts for something.
But if AI is narrowing the market down before the customer’s even properly started comparing, you can’t really lean only on the stuff you control. The system is also reading what the market says about you. Things like reviews, journalists, creators, online communities, Reddit threads, buying guides, customer proof, search demand, every mention and citation that’s scattered around the web.
Your website isn’t suddenly less important because of this; it’s just not enough on its own anymore. It’s not only what you say about yourself that matters now, but also what the market says around you too.
This is probably the bit that matters most to me. In a traditional journey, the customer does most of the work of building trust themselves. Searching, clicking, comparing, reading reviews, asking around, slowly building up confidence in whatever they end up choosing. In an AI shaped journey, a good chunk of that judgement gets handed over to the system instead.
AI is narrowing the shortlist before the customer even starts properly comparing, which means AI has to make some kind of trust call before the customer gets the chance to. Not trust in a human, emotional sense obvious but more a judgement based on patterns. Does this brand look credible? Is it known? Do other people back it up? Does the same story show up wherever you look for it?
In the talk I broke this down into four things I think matter:
None of that is really an AI signal on its own, but instead is what makes a strong brand in the first place. AI doesn’t make brand less important but rather puts more pressure on brands to be understood clearly and trusted consistently, wherever people happen to be looking.
There’s still plenty brands should be doing from a search and content point of view, and we’re doing this for clients right now. I mentioned some of this earlier but things like clear product information, having helpful guides, FAQs, structured data, solid category content, expert input, better comparison content, decent technical hygiene. All of it helps people, and systems, understand what you actually do.
However the main thing I wanted ti highlight in my talk was that getting the basics right gets you into the game, but over time those basics tend to become table stakes, and that’s happened with pretty much every digital channel there’s ever been. Early movers get an advantage for a while, then everyone else catches up, the playbook becomes common knowledge, and the easy wins start to flatten out.
I’d guess AI visibility goes the same way eventually, in fact I guarantee it. Right now we’re still early enough that getting the fundamentals right will genuinely move things for you. But once everyone’s doing that, the thing that sets brands apart won’t be who ticked the most optimisation boxes, it’ll be who actually has the stronger brand. Who people talk about, who they remember, who they trust, who the market backs up, who has enough evidence sitting around them that a system feels confident surfacing them.
Optimisation gets you found but brand is what gets you chosen.
This is roughly where I ended the talk because for a long time a lot of digital marketing has been fairly obsessed with vanity metrics and things like visibility, or ranking higher, or getting more impressions/clicks etc. All still worth caring about, to be clear.
But if AI keeps shaping how people discover, compare and decide, the bigger prize starts to shift. It’s not really about visibility any more so much as becoming the default recommendation.
That doesn’t mean every purchase gets handed over to AI completely. People will still care, still browse, still want inspiration and reassurance, especially somewhere like home and garden where choices tend to be personal and often quite considered. But the direction things are heading in feels pretty clear in that AI is moving from answering questions, to narrowing down choices, to eventually taking action on someone’s behalf.
So brands probably need to stop asking just “how do we appear” and start asking “why would we actually get chosen.”
I don’t think the answer is to panic about any of this, and I don’t think the answer is briefing someone to “optimise us for ChatGPT” and assuming that sorts everything out.
A better place to start is looking honestly at the signals that already exist around your brand. Where are you visible. Where are you actually trusted. Where are you being validated. Where are competitors getting talked about while you’re not. What would AI actually understand about your brand if it looked across your reviews, your coverage, your content, communities, search demand and customer proof.
That’s part of why we’ve started running what we’re calling a shortlist audit. It’s a fairly simple way of looking at whether a brand has the evidence, distinctiveness, grounding and evaluation it needs to actually show up in AI shaped discovery.
Evidence, meaning who validates you. Distinctiveness, meaning why you’d be chosen over anyone else. Grounding, meaning whether you’ve given people and systems enough to actually understand you. Evaluation, meaning whether you can measure if trust and visibility are growing over time.
None of this is really about appearing in AI for its own sake. It’s about building the kind of brand that’s credible enough to be surfaced, trusted enough to be considered, and strong enough to actually be chosen.
If you came to the talk and didn’t get round to scanning the QR code, feel free to drop me a message about the free audits we mentioned at Ant@weareboutique.co.uk. Happy to send more over.
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