Brand Is The New Search Engine Optimization
In 1996, two Ph.D. students at Stanford had an idea: what if the internet was like academia? What if a link was like a citation? The more popular pages and the pages that were popular among the more popular pages should come to the top of search engine listings.
The students were Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The company they founded around this idea was called Google. And while Google now has a machine learning backbone on over 200 variables, the idea that “links are good; good links are better” is still a fundamental part of ratings.
But a decade ago, Google patented and rolled out with Panda, an update that devalued links from content farms and other fake search engine optimization (SEO) tactics. A vital part of the patent was
“An implied link is a reference to a target resource, e.g., a citation to the target resource, which is included in a source resource but is not an express link to the target resource. Thus, a resource in the group can be the target of an implied link without a user being able to navigate to the resource by following the implied link.”
In other words, a mention matters. The more people talk about you, the more attention you will get, regardless of whether they link to you when they talk about you.
This implied link infrastructure is part of why brand is the new search engine optimization. The stronger your brand is, and the more people talk about you, the more Google and other search engines value your content.
Google has said as much. They talk about E-E-A-T – experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust. It’s difficult to quantify whether something is trustworthy by whether someone links to it. It’s easy to quantify by how people talk about it.
Because AI can tease out sentiment and trust, AI is the other reason why brand is the new search engine optimization. Large language models use the web as training data. Google is one of the leaders in both search and AI and has been testing AI results. Those results come from crawling the web, and, as you saw above, they are looking at mentions, not just links.
It used to be that if you weren’t linked to, you didn’t exist. Now, it’s if you aren’t talked about.
Conversely, the more you are talked and posted about in the conversation, the more you will show up to people interested in learning more. The winners will win, and it will get increasingly tough to change AI’s mind about what matters. Strategies that are difficult to qualify and live at the top of the funnel (like influencer marketing, public relations, and earned media efforts) will be increasingly important to whether people get to the bottom of the funnel.
Thus, the strength of your brand and your place in the conversation is vitally important, now more than ever.
