The age of Earned Visibility

Last week our editor and technical lead Jake Christian enjoyed a Bristol Creative Industries brunch event at Temple 1852 presented by Amy Simpson, Co-Founder of Yours Sincerely and Kate Sikora, Managing partner at Noble Performs. Their talk focused on the shift in visibility for brands from traditional searches through platforms such as Google and Bing to AI generated results. Over the last few years, use of traditional search engines has declined, as more users make use of AI chatbots such as Chat GPT, Claude and Google Gemini.

There’s also been an increased use of social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn, making the way users search for information more varied than ever before. Currently, more than 60% of all of the answers from AI-powered summaries are sourced from editorial media. AI Chatbots and social media platforms can offer a more personalised and detailed search with even faster visual based results, which is one of the key reasons for their continued growth.

This on-going shift is leading us into what is being called the ‘Earned Visibility era’ where SEO and paid advertising, despite still being incredibly important and effective, may not necessarily be the best option to reach new audiences and to expand your business. Companies with a social media presence and strong website already utilising SEO will still find organic traffic coming through traditional search engines, but there will be a growing necessity to focus on achieving results from AI searches through citations, personalisation and consistency.

In the age of Earned Visibility, both retaining and increasing your level of discoverability is an ongoing task where SEO practices need to be adapted and multiple channels to promote your brand should be considered. SEO has of course always been about continually adapting and evolving a bit like The Red Queen Hypothesis, which takes its name from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” - A quote which may resonate with anyone using paid ads to compete for SEO rankings – yes, it can be exhausting! However, our take on it is that Earned Visibility, to borrow again from evolutionary theory, is a bit more like Honest Signalling, a great example of which is a pronking springbok who signals honestly to predators that it is young, fit, and not worth chasing. It IS exactly what it is advertising it is.

Whilst we can’t match the athleticism of a springbok, we can all honestly signal what we do and what we do well. For us that’s specialising in video production for the science, tech and higher education sectors. That’s what we know, what we like to write about and what we promote in collaboration with our clients and partners. The more we communicate our enthusiasm for these sectors and provide information valuable and relevant to them, the easier it should be for great fit clients to find us via AI, and vice versa.