Avinash tells us how AI-based answer systems are redefining corporate reputation, shifting attention from what brands say to what others say about them
Here we are again on SEO Confidential. The first interview of the new year opens with an implicit yet inevitable question:
how much of what is being said about artificial intelligence today is actually useful for making concrete decisions?
If you work in search marketing, you already know the noise is everywhere. Announcements, promises, models that change name and shape within a few months.
In the middle of all this, finding your bearings is getting harder and harder. That is why a clear choice is needed: fewer slogans, more substance. Less hype, more strategy.
Today’s guest is Avinash Kaushik, Chief Strategy Officer at Human Made Machine and brand strategy advisor for Tapestry. After sixteen years at Google, Avinash has built his work on an idea that is simple and demanding at the same time: helping companies and professionals think better, using solid frameworks on artificial intelligence, marketing and analytics.
Trust me, there was no better way to start the new year.
Avinash talked to us about brand identity in the era of AI-based answer systems, about metrics that reassure but do not explain, and about decisions many organizations keep postponing. Topics that directly affect your work today, not in some abstract future.
If you are looking for comfortable answers, this interview is not for you. If instead you want to understand what is really changing and why ignoring it is becoming a concrete risk, you are in the right place.
Here is what Avinash told us. Enjoy the read.
“Our reputation is not what we say about ourselves, but rather what others say” (and in the AI era this is truer than ever)
In AI-based answer systems, a brand’s identity is increasingly built by external sources: reviews, social media, uncontrolled content. How dangerous is it to let “others” decide who you are, and what mistakes are organizations that are not acting on this front already paying for?
It is important to realize that even with the old search models (Bing, Google, Seznam), external sources have always contributed to defining a brand’s identity and perception. With the introduction of AI-based systems, however, two significant changes emerge.
The first concerns the different weight given to information sources. Some signals become more important than in the past, while others lose relevance. In truly multimodal models, for example, audio and video content seems to carry much more weight in shaping answers and brand representations, even though most companies keep investing mainly in text content.
The second change concerns the nature of the sources considered. Third-party content, particularly long tail content, together with contributions from micro and nano influencers (those who operate on social media and the web with relatively small but highly engaged communities, Ed.), is valued more than in traditional search systems, with a more direct impact on brand reputation and visibility.
I think that, as brands, we need to publish much more 1P content (content created and published directly by the brand, Ed.) – not just e-commerce content. We need content capable of telling the brand’s story in full: the product, the values, customer support, use cases, innovation processes and the company’s overall identity.
This first-party content must then be distributed widely and consistently, so as to cover more touchpoints and provide search and AI systems with clear, authoritative and continuous signals about the brand’s identity.
What is new is that we need to be more “aggressive” toward 3P content (stories, reviews, etc.) written and spread by parties outside the brand. Today many brands oversee this content superficially, merely enduring it. In AI-based systems, I believe this weakness will have a much bigger impact than in the past.
Remember, our reputation is not what we say, but rather what others say. This has always been true. So, even with all the AI-driven changes, it is important to create a great product or service, be exceptional at customer support, and invest in innovation. The safest bet is to be a brand worth talking about.
[If you want to dig deeper into this topic, I discussed it at length in this post on my blog: AI Age Marketing: Bye SEO, Hello AEO!]
Many companies claim to be “doing AI”, but in reality they use it for tests or to optimize marginal activities. In a market changing this fast, how short-sighted is it to keep avoiding structural decisions on analytics, creativity and budget for fear of making mistakes?
It is extremely short-sighted not to take the AI transformation seriously. It is already here in some areas for every company, such as software development, creative work, corporate security, media targeting and more. Other areas will follow soon.
The smartest companies are thinking about artificial intelligence in three ways:
AI as a tool: everything that can be automated today. Writing code for sophisticated operations. Protecting corporate networks. Performing fraud detection automatically. Building financial forecasting models of incredible sophistication. All of this is possible today – you should already be doing it.
AI as a copilot: all the initiatives where artificial intelligence supports human work, making it more effective. More targeted advertising, creative products made at a fraction of traditional costs, talent analytics in HR, supply chain optimization. In these cases AI does not replace people, it augments their capabilities, improving the quality of the work (as well as the speed, of course!).
AI as a muse: all the kinds of work where AI can serve as inspiration. A very smart graduate assistant who can do research for you and spark new ideas. Building the first version of a mobile app or a website for you: it will not be perfect, but it will bring you closer to understanding what you might want.
I encourage every company to think about these three possibilities – tool, copilot, muse – and activate them in a concrete way. This is where immediate gains in productivity, innovation capacity and organizational agility come from.
Many teams keep presenting reports full of traffic, impressions and growth percentages, even though the real impact on the business is declining. In this transition phase, how much damage are vanity metrics (better for the ego than for revenue) doing to strategic decisions and to marketing’s credibility within organizations?
As you mentioned, relying on vanity metrics has never been smart. They are easy to obtain, but they have never provided insights – on the contrary, they have often distracted attention from what really mattered.
Likewise, focusing on poor methodologies such as last-click attribution actively harms the ability to make more informed and strategic decisions.
My advice is to focus on KPIs, that is, key performance indicators. This is the kind of metric that, when it goes up or down, immediately makes your financial results go up or down.
Profit remains the most solid KPI. The question to ask is simple: what is marketing doing that generates real profit? Not proxies, not estimates, but profit. Other relevant KPIs include in-store conversion rate, revenue attributed through MTA models (Multi-Touch Attribution, a model that assigns the value of a conversion to all the channels and touchpoints involved in the user’s journey, instead of crediting only the last click, Ed.) and cost per incremental sale. These are the indicators against which the contribution of owned, earned and paid marketing should be measured, both in brand and in performance terms.
As for the new AI-based answer engines, such as ChatGPT, Qwen or Mistral, it is useful to introduce specific KPIs, as I wrote on my blog.
In particular: the visibility score, the average position and the AI brand score. These are metrics that help assess the brand’s presence and relevance in an ecosystem that no longer relies on traffic alone, but on the ability to be selected and cited in AI-generated answers.
Below you will find the video where I comment on the interview with Avinash. Trust me: it is really worth watching. Let me know what you think in the comments!
Marketing can no longer be decorative: we need consistency between identity, actions and perception
If you work in marketing or search, it is hard to come out of this interview without feeling personally called into question.
What Avinash describes is not about distant scenarios or theoretical hypotheses, but about decisions that are already weighing on the daily work of teams and companies. Artificial intelligence is no longer something to “keep an eye on”: it is already inside processes, inside answer systems, inside the criteria by which brands are interpreted and narrated.
The strongest point is perhaps the most uncomfortable one. A brand’s identity is no longer fully under your control, and continuing to ignore what is being said on the outside means leaving it to others to define you.
At the same time, Avinash dismantles one of the most widespread illusions: measuring is not enough, if you measure the wrong things. Traffic, impressions and growth percentages are reassuring, but they do not explain whether marketing is truly creating value.
This conversation invites you to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Fewer comfortable metrics, more accountability. Fewer isolated experiments, more structural choices.
Pretending it is enough to adapt a few tactics or add a new tool is an illusion many companies are already paying for.
Let me say it bluntly: marketing can no longer afford to be decorative.
It must go back to being a function that takes a stand, measures real impact and takes responsibility for its own choices. This applies to content, to managing external reputation and, above all, to the metrics used to communicate one’s value within organizations.
If there is one clear direction, it is this: less self-referential storytelling, more alignment between what the brand is, what it does and what others say about it.
In the age of artificial intelligence, consistency is no longer an abstract value, but a necessary condition for existing in the systems that mediate attention and trust.
Next week we will be back with another international guest, ready to challenge new certainties. If this conversation made you think, I invite you to catch up on the previous episodes of SEO Confidential.
See you soon and #avantitutta!
