The Signal
How brands earn attention, trust and growth in the age of AI
Trust is the next brand asset
Nobody knows yet how much AI will change shopping. The forecasts are confident and the evidence is limited. But one part of the picture already looks clear to me. More shoppers now ask an AI...
AI reads your reviews. In our data, the star rating didn't move it.
Trust now gets reviewed twice, once by the shopper and once by the AI answering for them. Across 27 brands, the star rating didn't predict how often AI named a brand. What customers wrote looked more promising.
Brand building has always been a memory game. Now there are two.
Byron Sharp proved brands grow by being mentally available. The Extended Mind Hypothesis — and new AI research — means brands now compete in two memory structures at once.
AI is the new digital shelf. Visibility isn't availability.
The AI performance market measures visibility. But AI availability — whether you're the brand AI reliably recommends across the situations buyers ask in — is what actually drives growth.
Your brand is 4× more visible in AI when you have a community.
SE Ranking studied 2.3M pages — brands with real community presence get cited by AI 4× more. Community sits in the Signal layer; it's how brand substance becomes AI recommendations.
Share of Search predicted market share. Share of AI Voice is next.
In 2020, Share of Search was confirmed as a leading indicator of market share. We're now tracking Share of AI Voice across 13 sectors — and the loudest brands aren't the ones AI surfaces.
Three beauty brands. Why brand beats AEO in AI.
A skincare brand-health report on CeraVe, The Ordinary and Drunk Elephant. The brand with the best technical setup performs worst; the one with the strongest community wins. Brand is 70% of AI performance, structural tactics 30%.
The brand AI recommends isn’t built by your marketing team. It’s built by your community.
A few weeks ago I posted a framework I’d been working on.
What gives brands an edge in AI
63 brands, 12 sectors. The top quartile scores 46% higher on AI visibility — and earned presence is the dominant predictor (+181%). The brands that win aren't louder; they're more coherent.
AI builds your brand from what others say — not what you own.
In traditional media you control the message. In AI, the medium assembles its own version of your brand from earned signals — reviews, Reddit, press. The work is closing the gap between the brand you intend and the one AI has already built.
Brand equity is 63% of AI visibility. GEO is the short game.
WARC's LLM Visibility Drivers study found long-term brand equity accounts for 63% of what makes a brand visible in AI. The optimisation playbook is short-term. Brand equity is the dominant signal across every model.
System 0 - The New Level in Attention Science
The thinking that happens before you think...
The ATTENT10N score is launching.
How changing media and AI affect brands, consumers and strategy. The ATTENT10N score is our first public measure. Sign up to see it first.
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