Rankings Are Out, Authority Is In
A dispatch from day one from BrightonSEO 2025, San Diego, CA.
TLDR
SEO isn’t dead, but it is changing quickly. The common theme at this year’s BrightonSEO is that traffic and rank still matter, but they are weak indicators of performance. “Winning” now requires building brand authority, earning citations across the web, and creating human-generated content to counter Google’s efforts to combat low-grade AI text. The mandate for digital operators is clear: everything is a search, social, video, and conversational channel.
Search is everywhere and multimodal
Search begins with YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Nikki Lam (NP Digital) says it most succinctly, Search is now everywhere”, and later said, “search is a whole ecosystem now, and it’s our job as search marketers to meet people where they are.” Treat platforms as connected entry points, not silos. Treat comments and replies as content worth crafting. Recent data from Datos shows that we need to expand beyond “traditional SEO” as searches on YouTube, Pinterest, and Reddit have increased last year by 3x, 2x, and 30% respectively.
Traffic from AI tends to be at lower volumes, but it typically converts at a higher rate due to its lower position in the funnel. Visitors who click through from an answer engine arrive prequalified. They have moved past browsing and are in the deciding stage. Shorter website sessions still produce healthier pipelines when the page matches the intent that earned the citation.
From rankings to citations and authority
Classic KPIs chase positions and clicks. In a personalized and probabilistic AI environment, these measures don’t capture what’s actually happening.
While rankings fluctuate from scheduled algorithm updates and the endless “black hat SEOs”, long-term gains are being won by those shifting the scoreboard to share of voice and citation frequency. Map where your name shows up and why. Track which assets get quoted in social threads and embedded in newsletters. Confirm that structured data matches the visible page, since AI models read both. The goal is a trail of evidence that systems and people can verify.
According to experts, practical steps involve pairing each flagship page with a short video or thread that answers the same question. Publish original datasets, demos, and field notes that others will cite. Encourage subject matter experts to post where they already have native audiences.
Human authenticity
Authority compounds when real people put their names on real work, and Google’s penalties for scaled, thin AI text are not theoretical. Maddie Lambert (Originality.Ai) found that 100% of the websites that had received a manual action penalty showed clear signs of using AI content in their articles. Google is clearly punishing lazy content pipelines because AI-slop content poses a significant risk to the longevity of their AI models.
“Make fans,” says Will Reynolds of Seer Interactive. Creating shareable content on social media requires you to create content that resonates with humans, not algorithms. Google may or may not show the best content because much of the top-performing content on Google has been optimized for ranking, not for human connection. On social media, content that users are willing to share also tends to convert at a higher rate than traditional web copy.
What to do now
Start with an audit. Where does your brand already earn citations across social, video, and forums. Which posts or clips get referenced by others. Use that baseline to guide where to publish next.
Report on citations across platforms and the conversion that follows AI referrals. Celebrate posts that spark replies from respected voices. Track expert participation as a leading indicator of authority.
The old playbook rewarded volume. The new one rewards proof. Be findable in the places people actually look. Publish work that a model would be confident quoting and a person would be proud to share. That is how brands win the next phase of search.