BrightEdge

✨At SPARK Live in London on June 10 and Sydney on June 18, hear directly from enterprise customer leaders at Persimmon, Kantar, Belron, and Telstra on how their teams are operationalizing AI search. Jim Yu opens London with the leadership keynote. Sydney closes the week with a full-day AI Certification track. 🔍Two cities. One agenda built around how AI is reshaping search, discovery, and digital visibility. Reserve your seat for the city closest to you.👇 #SEO #AISearch #AEO #BrightEdge #SPARKLive London: https://lnkd.in/eiYPG3JP Sydney: https://lnkd.in/eUk7m6Ad

Product recommendations. Solution comparisons. Brand citations. 🎯 All three now surface inside AI-generated answers before customers reach your site. 🔎 Join Dave McAnally on Wednesday, May 20 at 10am PDT for an exclusive preview of BrightEdge research on how AI is reshaping customer journeys, where visibility is being won and lost, and what marketers need to do to stay present. 👇 Reserve your seat now. https://lnkd.in/ezkHSD7G #AISearch #AEO #SEO #BrightEdge

👀 What separates marketing teams and organizations pulling ahead in AI from those stuck in abstract conversations?🤖 🔍We surveyed more than 1,000 enterprise digital and search marketers over three months to take an honest read on AI agent and AEO readiness across the org: where awareness sits, where ownership lives, and where alignment between marketing, IT, and leadership is clear and where it breaks down. 🎯 Key findings cover: 1. How marketers would actually answer if their CMO asked tomorrow, "are we ready for AI agents?" 👤 2. Who inside the enterprise owns the question of whether AI agents can access the site, and why it landed where it did 3. The single phrase that's moving the needle on internal buy-in faster than any strategy deck🧭 4. Why a majority of cross-functional conversations with IT and security stall, get blocked, or quietly get avoided 5. What enterprise teams say they need most right now to move forward (it's not more strategy) You can view the full findings here: https://lnkd.in/eGnumdmB #AISearch #AIAgents #SEO #CMO #AEO #BrightEdge #MarketingStrategy

When AI changes the search results page, who gets seen, who gets selected, and who gets left out? That is the question marketing leaders are working through right now. At SPARK Live London, you will hear directly from leaders at Belron, Persimmon Homes, and Kantar on how they are navigating this shift across global brands, high-consideration customer journeys, and performance-led digital strategies. Customer panel at SPARK Live London features: → Chris Ellis, Group Digital Marketing Manager, Belron → Sha Gorur, Global Head of Digital, Kantar → Ben Dales, Group Head of Digital Marketing, Persimmon Homes The full agenda also includes a BrightEdge keynote, networking with senior marketing and digital leaders, and more. View the agenda and event details here 👉 https://lnkd.in/giUQFuf6 If your team is thinking about visibility, discovery and growth in the age of AI search, this is the room to be in. #BrightEdge #SPARKLive #SPARKLiveLondon #SEO #AEO #DigitalMarketing

70% of CMOs say becoming an AI leader is critical in 2026. The exact same 70% admit they're not operationally ready to deliver on it. That's not a paradox. It's the defining problem in marketing this year.   Two pieces of CMO research dropped recently that I've been working through. Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey and the latest CMO Survey from Christine Moorman's team at Duke.   🔍 Read together, they tell a sharp story.   The #CMOSurvey shows AI use in marketing has nearly doubled in two years, from 13.1% of activities in 2024 to 24.2% today, with generative AI up 220%. CMOs now expect AI to power 56% of all marketing activity within three years. 40% of companies are already practicing some form of Generative and Answer (AEO) Engine Optimization.   Gartner quantifies the readiness problem. CMOs are allocating 15.3% of marketing budgets to AI, but only 30% have the data foundations, governance, and talent to make those dollars work. 56% say they don't even have the budget to deliver their 2026 strategy.   💡 Here's my take:   The adoption argument is over. Execution is the entire ballgame.   And nowhere is that more urgent than at the new discovery layer. AI Overviews now appear on roughly half of Google queries. 94% of B2B buyers use generative AI in the buying journey. At BrightEdge, we now see AI agent activity at ~15% of total website traffic, on track to exceed human search visitors by year-end. Yet only 19% of brands have any specific policy for how AI agents access their sites.   Three things I'd put on the board for any CMO planning H2:   🤖 Treat AI agents like customers, not bots. Audit how they access, interpret, and represent your brand. Policies written in 2018 are leaking revenue today.   📊 Measure share of AI conversation alongside share of voice. Citations in LLMs are the new rankings.   🏗️ Double down on your core site and search foundations. Structured, authoritative content is what AI engines cite. The discipline you've built carries more leverage in an AI-driven world than it ever has.   The CMOs winning in 18 months won't be the ones who spent the most on AI. They'll be the ones who proved where they show up, why, and what it's worth.   #CMO # #AISearch #AEO #MarketingLeadership

⚡AI search shifted more in April than most marketing teams plan for in a quarter. Six findings from BrightEdge AI Hyper Cube and AI Catalyst, with implications and opportunities for every marketer and industry. Here is a key summary of Aprils key findings from BrightEdge weekly AI Search Insights.   Auto: AI Auto Purchase Journey: Branded vs Non-Branded Prompts • 70% of transactional auto prompts on ChatGPT contain no brand, yet 97% still produce a brand recommendation. • On Google's AI, branded prompts climb from 52% at informational to 64% at consideration as buyers move toward purchase.   Healthcare: How ChatGPT Handles Transactional Intent in Healthcare • Five transactional patterns surfaced even where trust matters most: finding care, symptom treatment, insurance coverage (dominated by GLP-1s), cost shopping (led by dental and vision), and benefits card use. • People aren't researching. They're acting.   Finance: How ChatGPT Handles Transactional Intent in Finance • Same shift, different vertical. Card applications, pre-approval, banking operations, credit access (unfreezing credit before applying), and agentic instructions like 'help me start a mortgage refi.' • Early funnel framing misses where the real work is.   Retail: Google AI Overviews vs ChatGPT Retailer Citations • AIO sends 30% of transactional citations directly to a retailer. ChatGPT sends 15%. • AIO's social proof signal is 4x stronger. YouTube and Facebook drive about 13% of its transactional citations vs 3% in ChatGPT. • ChatGPT surfaces 7.5 brands per response (AIO: 6.1), with a negative brand mention rate nearly 2x higher.   Wikipedia: How Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT Cite Wikipedia Differently • Cited alongside YouTube and Reddit in AIO. • Cited alongside Britannica and Merriam-Webster in ChatGPT. • When Wikipedia ranks #1 organically, AIO still skips it roughly a third of the time.   Across 5 engines: AI Search: Same Brands, Different Sources • Source agreement varies wildly (16 to 59%). Brand agreement holds steady (36 to 55%). • Authority and UGC mix is just as split. Gemini sits at 26% authority and near zero UGC. AI Overviews at 10% and 18%.   🔑 April's takeaway is simple to say and hard to do. The patterns across engines are common. The actions inside them are not. Non-branded discovery, transactional intent, and source diversity show up everywhere. But the right play shifts by category, engine, and buyer intent.   ⚡ The pace of change is weekly now, not quarterly. Quarterly tracking leaves you guessing. Weekly tracking puts you in the answer, positioned the way you actually want AI to position you.   📊You can dig deeper and stay up to date in all our weekly AI search insights here: https://lnkd.in/gAw-ySaW   What's the most surprising AI behavior you've seen in your category this month?   #AISearch #SEO #AEO #BrightEdge

👉AI is changing the customer journey faster than most teams realize. Customers are no longer moving neatly from search, to website, to comparison, to decision. AI-generated answers are now pulling product recommendations, solution comparisons, brand mentions, and citations directly into the discovery experience, often before someone ever reaches a traditional search results page. That creates a big question for marketers: Is your brand showing up in the moments that now influence decisions?🔍 On Wednesday, May 20 at 10:00 AM PT, we are hosting a live webinar: AI Is Accelerating the Customer Journey. Is Your Brand Keeping Up? We will cover how AI search is compressing the funnel, what it means for content strategy and measurement, how leading teams are tracking their prompt universe, and how BrightEdge innovations are helping brands stay visible in AI search. Join us live and learn how to keep your brand part of the decision. Register here: https://lnkd.in/g9nhPBVs #Brightedgeevents #SEO #AEO #Digitalmarketing

🤖 5 AI engines. 5 different paths. 3 source layers. A look at how AI engines cite sources differently, and what this means for the way brands need to build their AI Search strategy. Did you know that 5 AI search engines pull from wildly different corners of the web, but still converge on the same brands? A great read from Roger Montti on #SearchEngineJournal featuring the latest from BrightEdge AI Catalyst™ 📈 In his article, he goes deep into what this divergence means for SEO and AI search strategy and the importance of establishing a brand connection to products and services. 💡 Key highlights: • Source overlap between engines runs from 16% to 59% (a wide spread of 43 points) • Brand mention overlap runs from 36% to 55% (a much tighter band of just 19 points) • Gemini cites just 0.2% UGC, while Google AI Overviews sits at 18% (a 90x difference) • Three source layers every brand needs to cover: institutional, commercial/ editorial, and UGC The key takeaway: The divergence lies in the path. The convergence lies in the answer. The insight for marketers and SEO teams is clear. Your AI visibility strategy needs to be organised around three source layers: 🏛️ Authoritative 📰 Commercial and editorial 💬 User-generated Roger sums it up perfectly 👇 “In my opinion, the takeaway here is that associating a brand with a product or service in a consumer’s mind is a powerful way to influence user expectations which can then translate into branded search. This is something that the SEO community has been slow to pick up on, even though Google has been hinting at user signals playing a strong role in rankings.” The brands winning in AI search aren’t the ones building 5 different playbooks. They’re the ones showing up consistently across every layer of the web that AI engines reach for. 🎯 That means weighting each layer by which products your brand buyers actually use and make sure your core SEO foundation (site and content) is structured for AI. Optimize once and win across every layer. https://lnkd.in/gWHJs3gz Why AI Engines Cite Different Sources but Recommend the Same Brands: https://lnkd.in/gpM47wKq #SEO #AISearch #AEO #ChatGPT #GoogleAI #Perplexity #Gemini #ContentStrategy #BrightEdge

Search is changing fast, and AI is reshaping how brands get discovered. Is your brand ready for the shift? Join us at SPARK Sydney on 18 June 2026 for an in-person event bringing together marketing leaders navigating the shift to AI-driven search. At SPARK Sydney, you will: ·      Hear from BrightEdge leaders and gain a clear view of how AI is reshaping search, discovery, and digital visibility. ·      Get a real-world perspective from BrightEdge customers on what is changing and how brands are adapting. ·      Take part in hands-on breakout sessions, including AI certification and peer roundtable discussions. ·      Walk away with practical strategies and ideas you can apply immediately. ·      Build connections with industry peers, experts, and fellow marketers throughout the day. Register here: https://lnkd.in/ge_4smJU #SPARKSydney #AISearch #SEO #DigitalMarketing #BrightEdge Kylie Tabrett

The AI Agent surge is not just one to watch, its one that brands need to take action on. Right now! CEO Jim Yu breaks down why in his latest post below. Our new AI Agents for Search Marketers Guide is aimed to help with the how. https://lnkd.in/eUJ4iB4t #AI #AIAgents #SEO #AEO #BrightEdge