Brand authority in the AI era: the signals to invest in now so you don’t disappear from the answers of AI-powered engines
Have you opened Google recently and noticed that the top results all look the same?
It’s not your imagination.
Over the past two years, thousands of sites have flooded the web with AI-generated content, chasing cheap traffic with a logic as simple as it is dangerous: the more you publish, the more you grow.
For a while, it worked.
Then Google started fighting back, and for many of those sites the organic traffic graph turned into a mountain: a steep climb, a peak, a vertical collapse. In the industry we call it “Mount AI,” and the victims number in the thousands.
But the problem isn’t just the risk of a penalty. It’s that while everyone was focused on volume, the rules of the game were changing in a much deeper way.
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Mode: these systems don’t reward whoever produces the most.
They reward whoever is perceived as an authoritative, trustworthy source.
And if your brand hasn’t built that reputation, you risk being invisible exactly where your potential customers are already looking for answers, today.
This week on SEO Confidential our guest is Gagan Ghotra, a Melbourne-based SEO Consultant with a laser-focused specialization in what matters most right now: technical SEO, optimization for Google AI Overviews and Discover, and brand building for AI-powered search.
Gagan is one of the clearest, most practical voices on visibility in answer engines, and what he told us in this interview is among the most useful material we have ever published in this column.
If you’re an entrepreneur or a professional who wants to understand how to become the answer AI systems give your potential customers, this is not an interview to skim. It’s one to read carefully, maybe even taking notes if you can.
You’ll find mistakes to avoid right away, signals to invest in now, and a very clear vision of where search is headed over the next two or three years.
Visible or invisible? How AI engines decide who gets cited and who gets ignored: Gagan Ghotra’s take
Many brands are automating SEO with artificial intelligence to produce content at scale. In your view, where is the line today between a smart strategy and a real risk of being penalized by Google?
The dividing line, at least for now, is fairly clear. The smartest strategy is to use artificial intelligence for tasks like research, outlining, first drafts, or brainstorming ideas.
Before any content gets published on the site, though, it’s essential that everything is carefully reviewed by real people. Every piece of content should include unique brand insights, original data, or hands-on experience that only your team can offer. These are exactly the elements that make the difference in terms of authority and credibility.
Today, this approach is one of the safest ways to stay out of trouble with Google under its policies against scaled content abuse.
At the same time, over the past six months there has been no shortage of examples of sites penalized by Google after rapidly scaling the production of low-quality, AI-generated TOFU content (editor’s note: TOFU stands for “Top of the Funnel,” very generic, informational content designed to reach people in the early stages of their buying or research journey, when they don’t yet know a brand well or haven’t decided what to do). In the industry, this phenomenon is now often called “Mount AI”: traffic grows fast for a while, hits a peak, and then suddenly collapses, leaving a mountain-shaped curve in the organic traffic graph.
To avoid this kind of situation, brands should move carefully and resist scaling AI content production too much, too fast. If AI is used on a small scale, it’s important to make sure every generated page includes original contributions, distinctive information, and real added value before it goes live on the site.
In recent months you’ve often talked about the importance of brand authority in SEO. If a company really wants to strengthen its authority in Google’s eyes, which concrete signals should it invest in today, and why: branded search, social, digital PR, video, brand mentions, or something else?
They all matter, but today I would rank them like this:
First, brand search volume: it’s one of the strongest signals that real people actually know and search for your brand. In a way, it also acts as a form of protection against future Google algorithm changes. If a domain gets consistent brand-driven traffic every month, the risk of being hit hard by updates tends to go down.
Digital PR + unlinked brand mentions: these show that people talk about you in the real world, not just in your on-page optimization. Many AI-powered search systems now tend to lean more and more on third-party brand mentions as sources or citations in the answers they generate. So if a brand wants to show up consistently in users’ conversations with tools like ChatGPT or AI Mode, it’s important to have a widespread presence across the web: both through digital PR, with in-depth, well-crafted articles, and through lighter citations, like Reddit discussions or LinkedIn posts.
High-quality backlinks from authoritative sources (still very effective, especially when earned through PR work).
Video content: it shows up across several SERP sections (the video block plus “What people are saying”) and helps build trust quickly. At the same time, YouTube is one of the most cited domains in AI Overviews and by AI Mode. That’s why, if you want your brand to appear more across Google’s surfaces, it’s best to run a YouTube video strategy where you consistently publish a few short vertical videos and some longer videos every month.
Social media presence for engagement and mentions: since AI-powered search systems increasingly cite forums like Reddit, it’s becoming really important for brands to be present in Reddit comments and on other social media platforms as well.
If an entrepreneur wanted to use AI to accelerate organic growth without putting the site at risk, what are the three mistakes they should never make?
Publishing raw or barely edited AI-generated content at scale is one of the riskiest mistakes. If the content offers no distinctive value and includes no real human expertise or original insight, it risks being classified as low quality. That can lead to algorithmic penalties from Google and a resulting drop in organic visibility.
Treating AI as a full replacement for strategy rather than an accelerator is another common mistake. Artificial intelligence can help speed up research, analysis, and production, but it can’t replace fundamentals like E-E-A-T, understanding search intent, and staying consistent with your area of expertise. For example, if a company operates in FinTech, mass-producing overly generic content like “what is banking?” or “what is a credit score?” risks drifting away from its real authority and weakening the brand’s positioning.
Over-expanding top-of-funnel (TOFU) content also calls for a lot of caution. Google is watching this kind of growth ever more closely, especially when it happens too fast or with undistinctive content. If the system detects artificial or low-quality expansion, sudden drops in rankings and organic traffic can follow.
By contrast, using AI in a balanced way, combining it with human expertise, original insights, and a strategy consistent with the brand, can turn both Google and AI-powered search systems into a major growth engine for the brand.
Google Discover can drive millions of visits, but many publishers also report sudden collapses that are hard to recover from. From your perspective, what are the most dangerous mistakes today that can get a publisher kicked out of Discover?
Among the most serious mistakes I see today is the rush toward trending topics that fall completely outside your editorial focus. This approach risks making a site look generic, inconsistent, and even spammy. If a publisher regularly covers four specific topics, it doesn’t make much sense to suddenly add four completely unrelated ones, or to start publishing content very different from what they’ve produced over the past twelve months. Topical consistency remains an important element, both for users and for Google, because it helps strengthen authority and editorial identity.
Another common mistake is publishing clickbait or low-engagement content that doesn’t really match what people expect to find after the click, or what they’re willing to read and share. Lately, many publishers have resorted to sensational headlines and featured images engineered to grab attention.
That strategy can work up to a point, but it requires a lot of caution, especially when it’s deployed at scale. If a site publishes, say, twenty articles a day and every one of them has clickbait-heavy headlines and images, the risk of getting into trouble rises significantly. In the long run, an excess of content built purely to chase clicks can undermine credibility, real engagement, and organic visibility.
If a publisher or a brand wanted to genuinely increase its chances of getting into Google Discover today, which signals should it strengthen first?
The most important element is still authority and relevance in your own field. That’s the foundation to build a solid presence on, especially if you want lasting visibility on surfaces like Discover.
Alongside that, the quality of your visual content matters a lot. Original, well-produced, high-quality images and videos can make a significant difference, because Discover tends to favor highly visual content that immediately grabs the user’s attention.
The ability to offer timely, newsworthy points of view is also gaining weight. Content that manages to plug into current conversations, or to catch the topics being discussed online within your niche, has a better chance of surfacing and gaining visibility.
Finally, it’s almost always better to keep your publishing quality consistent than to chase overly fast growth built on weak, sloppy articles. Trying to over-expand with low-value content rarely produces lasting results, while consistency and quality tend to build more trust over time.
Today plenty of sites publish content on trending topics far from their editorial focus. How risky is it, in your view, to broaden your topics too quickly just to chase traffic?
It’s very risky for most sites (unless you’re a true enterprise domain with incredibly high authority). This approach dilutes your topical authority, confuses Google about what your site is about, and, if the content is thin or AI-generated, you’re practically walking into an algorithmic penalty or a manual action. I always tell clients: master your niche first. Strategic expansion is fine, but only once you’ve built the authority and can actually add value in the new area.
There’s more and more talk of “AI Slop”: content generated at scale that ends up feeding unreliable SERPs and AI answers. In your view, is Google actually managing to tell useful content apart from content produced purely to scale traffic, or is the problem still underestimated?
Google is definitely getting better: we’re seeing more and more large-scale AI content sites being penalized or pushed to the bottom of the results.
The “Mount AI” examples are real and growing. I think it’s a growing problem for Google too, and they certainly don’t want more low-quality AI-generated content showing up in search results, or even in AI Overviews and AI Mode answers.
But it’s a genuinely hard technical problem and, based on my experience and what I see in the search results, Google seems to be trying to understand it and fix it. Over time, I think they’ll roll out some advanced technical solutions to surface more content in search results that isn’t “AI slop.”
An AI-generated answer can directly affect a brand’s reputation and the trust people place in it. If a company wants to keep inaccurate or distorted information about its business out of AI answers, what should it do in practice?
If a company wants to keep inaccurate or distorted information out of AI systems’ answers, it should take an active role in managing its own image.
The first step is publishing clear, authoritative, always up-to-date content on your own site, with visible trust signals such as author bios, sources, and dates. Beyond that, it’s important to invest in digital PR so that accurate news and correct brand mentions circulate across the web.
Message consistency across your site, social channels, and PR work also matters a lot: the more uniformly a brand communicates, the less room there is for AI to get things wrong. In general, the stronger the signals tied to the brand’s identity online and in the real world, the harder it will be for these systems to misread it.
With Preferred Sources, Google introduces an explicit user preference signal inside Search. Do you see it as a sign that Google is giving more and more weight to brand authority and trust signals over traditional SEO?
100%. It’s a very clear signal that Google is shifting its center of gravity toward genuine brand authority, trust, and user preferences, not just traditional ranking factors like links or on-page optimization. That’s also the direction AI-powered search is heading, where everything will be curated and personalized around each individual user’s needs.
Just recently, at Google I/O 2026, we saw demos of full pages being built and personalized around the user’s query, drawing on their search history and all the information available in Gmail, Google Calendar, and every other Google source. Based on all of that, a genuinely useful answer is created that meets that specific user’s every need.
If more and more users start actively choosing their preferred sources over the next few years, what should publishers and brands do today to increase their chances of being selected? What mistakes do you see most often?
My advice is to start right now to build genuine brand authority and a solid relationship with your audience. That means investing in consistent, high-quality content that offers original insights, instead of simply publishing large volumes of material with no real distinctive value. At the same time, digital PR and community engagement matter a great deal, because they help the brand get recognized, talked about, and seen as credible beyond its own site.
A strong, consistent presence across multiple channels also makes a difference, backed by concrete trust signals and social proof. Over time, the goal should be to become a true reference point in your industry: something people recognize and actively seek out.
The mistake I see most often is treating all of this as a box to check on an SEO checklist instead of a long-term brand-building effort. On top of that come inconsistent messages across channels and an excessive focus on publishing volume, at the expense of trust, quality, and real value for the audience.
Many companies still measure SEO success mainly by looking at rankings and organic traffic. Is that approach still enough today, or are you already seeing brands that are very strong on Google but almost invisible inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, or AI Overviews?
It’s not enough anymore. I sometimes see brands that rank well in traditional Google search but get almost zero visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews. I’m also noticing that ChatGPT is starting to generate some traffic for certain brands through citation links in its answers, something I’ve seen with a few clients.
What you need now is omnichannel visibility covering both traditional and AI-powered search. The way results are measured is changing too. Ranking and traffic data alone tell an increasingly incomplete story and risk missing the full picture. Over the next few years, it will probably be much harder to know with absolute precision where a conversion came from or which channel actually influenced the user’s journey.
Looking at the next two or three years, what do you think will be the biggest difference between the brands that manage to become truly visible in AI engines and those that risk disappearing from AI-generated conversations?
The real winners will be the brands that manage to establish themselves as genuine “sources of truth” in their industry. That means building recognized, credible expertise, backed by original research, valuable insights, and content that offers something truly distinctive.
At the same time, it will become increasingly important to strengthen E-E-A-T signals and consolidate trust around the brand through a strong, consistent presence across the web: from PR work to video, all the way to online communities and brand mentions in authoritative contexts. In the era of AI-powered answer engines, the winners will be the brands perceived as trustworthy, authoritative sources, not mere content producers.
Getting cited by AI isn’t luck. It’s a choice you make today
The moment you’re reading this article is probably the best moment to act. Not in six months, not after the next Google update. Now.
Because what Gagan Ghotra describes is not some future change.
It’s already happening.
The brands building real authority, communicating consistently across every channel, and investing in digital PR and content with a distinctive point of view are already building an advantage that will become very hard to overcome.
The point I find most important, and the one worth taking away with real clarity, is this: AI systems don’t cite whoever has published the most. They cite whoever is perceived as a trustworthy source in their field. And that perception is built over time, with consistency, with real authority, with the ability to say something others aren’t saying.
For an entrepreneur, this means something concrete: every piece of content published, every interview given, every LinkedIn post, every mention earned in an industry publication is a brick. Small, often invisible in the short term, but decisive in the long run.
Whoever starts building today will have an enormous advantage over those who keep waiting.
Thank you, Gagan, for your time and for the precision with which you shared your vision. See you at the next episode of SEO Confidential, with another international guest. Talk soon!
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