AI Search is Making Brand Building More Valuable
IAB Australia AI & Search Summit 2026 – An Executive Summary
– by James McDonald, Managing Director, Audience Group
AI took a Backseat to An Industry Realisation
After a half day of presentations at the IAB Australia AI & Search Summit for 2026, I don’t think the biggest story was AI or even AI search. The biggest story was convergence.
For twenty years digital marketing fragmented into specialist disciplines: SEO, paid search, content, PR, social, brand, publishers, analytics. AI search is pulling them back together.
Nearly every presentation reached the same conclusion from a different direction. But before we get to just what that conclusion was, here are my takeaways from the event.
10 Takeaways
1. Search is no longer about finding information
The traditional model was simple: search, click, website. The model is becoming: question, recommendation, decision.
Search engines are evolving from information retrieval systems into decision-support systems. Google’s Head of Performance Solutions and Retail Media, Adrian Vallelonga described this as moving from information presentation to decision augmentation.
Kantar’s Executive Group Director Karin Du Chenne argued that AI synthesises information rather than retrieving pages. Publishers argued clicks are becoming optional. Search practitioners themselves admitted traffic is becoming a weaker success metric.
The entire industry is moving from optimising towards audience delivery to optimising for recommendation.
2. Discovery has fragmented
Search is no longer synonymous with Google. Consumers now discover brands through Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Reddit, LinkedIn, TikTok, retail search, and communities.
The panel referred to this as Total Search. I think it’s actually broader than search. It is Total Discovery.
3. AI amplifies brand
Perhaps the biggest surprise of the day was hearing search specialists repeatedly talk about brand, reputation, sentiment, trust and meaningful differentiation. Those ideas have existed in advertising for decades. AI has simply forced search marketers to rediscover them.
SEO optimises for discoverability.
GEO optimises for recommendability.
To recommend a brand with confidence, AI systems rely on:
- Trusted sources
- Consistent descriptions
- Positive sentiment
- Authority
- Meaningful differentiation
None of those are purely SEO problems.
4. The unit of optimisation is changing
Historically we optimised keywords, pages and rankings. Optimisation is shifting to entities, semantic meaning, knowledge graphs, reputation, structured data and recommendations.
The machine isn’t asking, “Which page matches?” It’s asking, “Which brand best satisfies this need?”
5. Content strategy becomes intelligence driven
One of the strongest practical themes came from a tourism case study. The lesson it imparted was this: rather than producing content because someone brainstormed an idea, organisations should measure, identify wins, expand them and repeat.
SEO and GEO become a feedback loop. Organic search becomes a content intelligence system.
6. Structured data becomes infrastructure
Google’s Vallelonga repeatedly emphasised that products must become machine-readable. Structured data is no longer simply technical SEO. It becomes infrastructure for AI commerce. Machines cannot buy what they cannot understand.
7. Communities become training data
One of the most interesting strategic shifts came from Tom Tilney, Senior Agency Development Lead for Reddit. Reddit’s positioning wasn’t, “We’re a discovery platform.” It was, “We’re a validation platform.”
People increasingly ask AI, “Which is best?” and then ask Reddit, “Is that actually true?” Then, those discussions become future AI training data. Communities are becoming reputation engines.
8. Employees become media channels
Louise Wilson, Director Marketing Solutions for LinkedIn made an important observation: people trust people more than company pages. Future AI recommendations will increasingly absorb employee expertise, client endorsements, supplier recommendations and professional discussions. Brand becomes distributed.
9. Publishers are adapting
Publishers speaking at the event accepted several realities: search referrals are declining, social referrals are declining, AI referrals remain relatively small and zero-click search is the real disruption.
Interestingly, they are beginning to measure bot traffic → referral traffic rather than simply crawler volume.
Advertorials appear to be returning, not simply for human readership, but also because authoritative publisher mentions may influence AI understanding of brands.
10. Bot management becomes commercial strategy
The crawler session was perhaps the most technically important. Bots are no longer simply Googlebot. They include search crawlers, AI answer engines, AI training bots, shopping agents, browser agents and verification bots, each with a different commercial value.
The question is no longer, “Should we block AI?” but rather, “Which machines create value?”
The biggest contradiction I noticed
Search marketers are slowly rediscovering advertising.
Traffic, clicks and rankings always measured activity. Advertising has always been interested in changing behaviour. Now AI search forces search specialists to ask questions like:
- Does the brand get recommended?
- Is sentiment positive?
- Are people talking about us?
- Do trusted sources validate us?
- Does the AI trust us?
These have been advertising questions, not search questions.
My biggest unanswered questions
Several hypotheses emerged that deserve proper research.
- Can sentiment actually be optimised? – Everyone discussed sentiment. Nobody convincingly explained how marketers improve it. I suspect sentiment is largely an output of product quality, customer experience, PR, earned media and reputation rather than SEO.
- Does AI reward genuine differentiation? – Several speakers argued that meaningful differentiation matters, which aligns with Kantar’s findings. If true, GEO becomes another reason brands need real competitive advantage rather than merely better optimisation.
This leads to two questions: Is distinctiveness enough in an AI world? Is differentiation making a comeback?
One thought I’d add that wasn’t explicitly discussed.
Throughout the day, everyone spoke about AI as if it were replacing search. I don’t think that’s the right mental model.
Advertising has always tried to influence the conditions of choice. Search has always intercepted the moment of choice. AI is simply becoming another mechanism that shapes those conditions.
It doesn’t replace brand building. It makes brand building more valuable.
The irony is that the industry appears to be converging on something marketers have known for decades:
People don’t choose the brand with the best SEO. They choose the brand they trust, remember and believe is most likely to satisfy their needs. AI systems are increasingly trying to do the same thing.
The point I’d take away from the entire conference
The future of search is not about being found. It is about being confidently recommended by both humans and machines.
That, more than any individual technology or platform announcement, seemed to be the unifying message across every session.
