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Nov. 6—BEMIDJI — The second NCAA D-II women's soccer regional rankings were announced Wednesday afternoon, and the Bemidji State women's soccer team came in at fifth in the latest Central Region ranking ahead of the regular-season finale.
The Beavers hold a 13-2-3 record against Division-II opponents this season, trailing just Minnesota State (15) and Pittsburg State (13) for most D-II wins in the region. The No. 2 Mavericks lead the Central Region rankings, with Washburn, Pittsburg State and Central Missouri above the Beavers. BSU is one of fivw teams from the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference in the rankings.
The NSIC, the Mid-America Athletic Association and the Great American Conference make up the 36-team NCAA Central Region. The top eight teams in the region will advance to the NCAA region tournament. The two top-seeded teams in each region shall be offered the opportunity to host, provided minimum site selection criteria are met and a bid has been submitted. Automatic bids are granted to the winners of the MIAA, GAC and NSIC postseason tournaments, with the remaining five spots awarded on an at-large basis.
The NCAA Women's Soccer selection show will be streamed online at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 17, at NCAA.com.
The month of October saw great success for the program, going 7-0-2 during the month and averaging 2.22 goals per game while holding opponents to just 0.56 goals per game. Senior Katrina Barthelt led the Beavers during the month with 15 points and scored seven goals. She scored a goal in five of nine matches in October, including two multi-goal efforts.
Graduate goalkeeper Sonia Alfieri was nearly flawless during the month with an unbeaten 7-0-1 record between the posts for the Beavers. She allowed just four goals in October, totaled four shutouts, made 23 saves and boasted a 0.52 goals against average and .852 save percentage.
On the season, Bemidji State averages two goals per game while averaging just 0.59 goals allowed per game to rank second in the NSIC with a 1.41 scoring margin. The Beavers' 34 goals scored are the third most in the NSIC, while their 10 goals against are tied for the third least in the conference. BSU has scored first in 13 of 17 matches this season, tied for second most in the NSIC.
The Beavers have clinched home-field advantage for the first round of the NSIC Tournament and play at Chet Anderson Stadium on Monday, Nov. 10.
No. 2 Minnesota State secured its eighth NSIC regular-season championship this past weekend and clinched the No. 1 seed and home-field advantage in the tournament.
Building authority when no one’s heard of you can feel like trying to join a conversation that’s already halfway done.
You’ve got something worth saying, but no one’s listening yet.
In SEO terms, that’s tough – you need visibility to earn trust, but you need trust to gain visibility.
The good news: you don’t need fame or a huge LinkedIn following to be credible. You just need to be clear, consistent, and trustworthy.
Authority today isn’t about being loud – it’s about being legible to both people and search systems.
This article demonstrates how to establish authority during the “unknown but capable” stage.
It’s written from an SEO perspective, but it applies to anyone trying to turn genuine expertise into something that search engines and audiences recognize as valuable.
Authority isn’t fame – it’s consistency and evidence.
Search engines aren’t looking for celebrities. They’re looking for signals that prove you know what you’re talking about.
The same goes for your audience. People trust what they can understand, verify, and relate to.
So, what does authority look like in practice? Four things:
Clarity: Make it obvious who you are, what you do, and why it matters.
Depth: Stop chasing every keyword. Choose a few topics you can own and go deep.
Proof: Show that you’ve done the work. Demonstrate experience instead of rewording someone else’s article.
Corroboration: Earn validation from credible individuals or reputable publications to ensure your reputation isn’t solely based on your own claims.
Fame is attention. Authority is trust built through evidence and repetition – and you can build the second without the first if you design for it.
Before you publish anything, eliminate any confusion about who you are.
This applies to both people and search engines. They need a single, consistent version of you.
Start by building a proper home for your brand or your main author.
For an individual, that means a short, clear bio, a recent photo, a few sentences on your area of expertise, and a simple way to get in touch.
For a business, that means an About page, a Contact page, and a brief explanation of how you create and review content.
Verify your site in Google Search Console and make sure your company details are consistent across your website, social profiles, and all other online platforms where you appear.
Use structured data correctly.
Add Organization or LocalBusiness markup with your name, URL, and logo, and use Person markup for key authors.
On each article, include Article markup with the correct author name, date, headline, and image.
Keep your visible bylines and your code aligned – search engines notice inconsistencies.
Then tidy up your online footprint.
The first page of results for your name should tell a coherent story, not display a decade of abandoned projects.
Make sure your bio, profile photo, and company description match everywhere.
If a knowledge panel appears for your brand, claim it and correct any errors.
These small actions won’t directly boost rankings, but they remove friction when people (and algorithms) assess your credibility.
Show, don’t tell
This is where many businesses fall short. They describe what they do but don’t show it.
To build trust, you need tangible proof.
In SEO terms, that means creating what I call “originality assets” – things that prove you have first-hand experience.
These might include:
Small experiments, data sets, process checklists, or frameworks you’ve actually used.
A mini case study showing how you tested a new internal linking structure and what changed.
Anonymized client data that highlights an interesting trend.
A simple calculator, checklist, or template people can use and credit you for.
An interview with a respected peer in your industry.
If your outline doesn’t include at least one piece of proof, it’s probably not ready to publish.
Screenshots, data tables, charts, or step-by-step examples all show that you’ve done the work.
They also make it easier for others to reference or link back to you, which compounds authority over time.
Write for satisfaction, not coverage
Plenty of content “covers” a topic. Far fewer pieces actually help someone get something done – and that’s where authority grows.
Lead with the outcome
Give people the answer first, then show your evidence. Don’t bury the good stuff halfway down the page.
If you have a table, graph, or demo, place it near the top. Write like you’re sitting next to the reader, helping them do the thing.
Use the words your audience uses, not the ones that just sound clever.
Keep it short, clear, and useful
A long introduction that explains the obvious is just noise. Get to the point.
If your page feels slow, cluttered, or hard to navigate, people will leave.
Fast, clean, simple pages earn trust. Search engines notice engagement signals – but readers notice them first.
Accept that some answers will appear directly in search results
That’s not a failure.
Your job is to earn the next click by offering what a summary can’t: data, detail, real examples, or a template people can use.
Treat authorship like a product
When your brand isn’t yet known, your byline does a lot of the heavy lifting. Author pages shouldn’t be filler.
They’re your chance to show readers (and Google) that a real person stands behind the advice.
Include a short, professional bio that explains:
Who you are.
What you’ve done.
What you write about.
Add links that prove your experience – conference talks, case studies, podcast appearances, or published research.
Show that you’re active in your field. Group your articles by topic rather than date so readers can see depth right away.
Make sure your bylines are consistent. The name in your article schema should match what’s visible on the page.
If multiple people contribute to a piece, say so. A short note explaining who reviewed or edited the content adds transparency.
Small details like that signal reliability and care.
Start with one keystone piece that solves a problem from start to finish.
Then create three to six supporting articles that explore specific aspects of that problem, such as:
Comparisons.
Pitfalls.
Case studies.
Decision guides.
Link them together so readers can move through them naturally.
That structure helps both people and crawlers understand that you truly own the subject.
Each supporting article should include something tangible.
Data.
An example.
A visual.
A quote.
A process you’ve tested.
Over time, add adjacent clusters as you expand your expertise.
When your site starts to read like a small library on a subject, you’re on the right track.
Play the SERP that’s in front of you
The modern search results page blends links, videos, images, forums, and AI summaries. Work with it, not against it.
Look at what appears for your target terms
If the top results are mostly short videos, make one.
If forum discussions dominate, join the conversation and add value where it fits.
If the results include numerous comparison tables, create the best one.
You don’t have to do everything, but you do need to recognize what kind of content the searcher expects.
Sometimes you’re playing for visibility, not clicks. In that case, make your snippet irresistible.
Use a clear, benefit-driven title and a concise meta description that makes a promise – then deliver on it the moment someone lands on your page.
Measure progress by recognition, not vanity
Traffic isn’t the best measure of authority.
Look for signs that people are starting to recognize you as a source.
In Search Console:
Track growth in searches that combine your brand or name with your topics – that’s a sign people associate you with that subject.
Watch for new referring domains, especially high-quality, relevant ones. Track mentions, even without links – they still show your ideas are spreading.
Also, check:
How often your author name appears in search.
How many people click through to your author page.
Where you’re being mentioned.
Review the first page of results for your brand each month and make sure it still tells the story you want told. If it doesn’t, update it.
Authority isn’t a one-time project – it’s ongoing maintenance.
When you review data, always tie it to action. If growth slows, publish a new piece in your main topic cluster.
Pitch a byline to a relevant publication. If your branded results page looks messy, clean up your profiles.
Authority grows through small, repeatable habits done well.
If you’re not sure where to start, focus on one 90-day cycle – long enough to show progress, short enough to stay focused.
Month 1
Fix your foundations.
Verify your site.
Update your About and Contact pages.
Create solid Author pages.
Make sure your structured data is accurate and your online profiles match.
Google your name and clean up what appears.
Months 2–3
Choose one real problem your audience has and build a small content cluster around it.
Create a main guide and a few supporting pieces tackling different angles of the same issue.
Include at least one practical asset in each – a small test, checklist, or demo.
Publish them, share them, and see what resonates.
Final month
Focus on distribution and recognition.
Pitch one guest article or share your data with a relevant publication.
Talk about your findings on social channels or at an event.
Check analytics for early signs of movement – more branded searches, stronger engagement, or new citations – and use those insights to plan your next topic cluster.
Common mistakes to avoid
A few habits quietly kill authority before it starts.
Publishing thin summaries of other people’s research without adding your own perspective is one.
Spreading yourself across dozens of keywords instead of going deep on a few is another.
Having generic author bios that don’t prove experience wastes valuable real estate.
Posting one-off guest pieces on sites your buyers never visit won’t make a significant impact.
Ignoring how search results evolve will keep you behind. Consistency matters more than scale.
Authority doesn’t come from doing everything at once – it comes from showing up with something useful, again and again.
The repeatable path to becoming a trusted voice
Authority takes time, but it’s absolutely within reach.
Unknown brands can become trusted sources by being easy to understand, worth believing, and easy to verify.
You achieve this by:
Making your identity clear.
Creating content that showcases your real experience.
Earning recognition where it matters.
Watching for the signals that indicate people are starting to notice.
If you only do four things, start here:
Fix your identity so your site, profiles, and search results tell the same story.
Publish one main guide and three supporting pieces on a single topic, each with something tangible near the top.
Share one insight or dataset with a respected publication in your space.
Finally, track recognition – not just traffic. Look for signs that people are starting to connect your name with your niche.
You don’t need a famous name to build authority. You need a plan you can stick to for 90 days, then repeat.
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The holiday season is make-or-break for email marketers. With inboxes bursting from October through New Year’s, even your most dazzling email content could disappear into spam folders if your deliverability isn’t solid.
Mailbox Providers (MBPs), such as Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook, receive an overwhelming volume of emails during peak seasons. Their systems work harder to protect their users and reward senders who follow best practices with more reliable inbox placement.
The good news? You can stay ahead with a few strategic steps. Here are four essential tips to boost your email delivery rate and ensure your campaigns reach the inbox this holiday season.
1. Understand How Deliverability Really Works
Deliverability goes beyond pressing send. It’s the difference between your email being delivered and it actually landing in the inbox. Each send passes through two main stages:
Stage 1: Delivery. Your email is transmitted to an MBP (like Gmail or Outlook) and either accepted or rejected. Hard bounces occur when an address is invalid. Soft bounces occur when an inbox is temporarily unavailable (for example, due to full storage).
Stage 2: Inbox placement. Once accepted, the provider decides where your message goes: inbox, promotions tab or spam. This judgment is based on factors like authentication, sender reputation and recipient engagement.
During peak holiday months, email traffic can double or triple — especially around major shopping days. MBPs must protect users from unwanted or malicious emails, which means even legitimate senders face heightened scrutiny. Understanding this process helps marketers plan more strategically and avoid looking “spammy” to the algorithms that decide inbox fate.
Sender reputation is your credibility score with mailbox providers. Think of it as your brand’s trust rating in the email world. A strong reputation earns you consistent inbox access; a weak one can land even your best content in spam.
Two factors carry the most weight:
Audience engagement. High open and click rates tell MBPs your messages are wanted. They also measure dwell time (how long emails are open), whether recipients add you to contacts or delete messages unopened. These small actions add up to big reputation signals.
List quality. Healthy lists equal healthy results. The holidays often bring a surge in signups, but not all contacts are equal. Focus on quality over quantity. Use permission-based opt-ins, utilize welcome series to set expectations, secure your forms with ReCAPTCHA and regularly review your list based on audience engagement. Remember that every contact should have opted in through a compliant process. If you’re collecting new subscribers during the holidays, follow with an automated welcome email that confirms expectations and builds immediate trust.
To keep your reputation strong:
Re-engage inactive subscribers early. Start your warm-up campaigns before the rush to re-spark engagement.
Clean your list regularly. Remove dormant contacts who haven’t interacted in months.
Honor unsubscribes immediately. A fast, frictionless opt-out keeps you compliant and builds trust.
Authenticate your domain. Proper SPF, DKIM, and DMARC settings are table stakes for modern deliverability.
By maintaining good list hygiene and engagement practices, your emails are far more likely to land where they belong. Refresh your email list-building skills with Campaign Monitor’s quick guide.
3. Avoid sudden strategy changes.
As the holidays heat up, it’s tempting to ramp up your send volume or reach out to older contacts. But sudden shifts in cadence, audience size, or content tone can raise red flags. MBPs track consistency. If your patterns change abruptly—say, doubling your frequency in one week—it may look like your account was compromised or that you’re engaging in spammy behavior.
Gmail’s “Manage Subscriptions” feature now allows users to unsubscribe from multiple senders quickly and easily. This means your content needs to be relevant and valuable to keep subscribers engaged.
Keep your program steady and predictable with these basics:
Do:
Keep a consistent sending cadence.
Warm new segments gradually.
Offer subscribers control through preference centers or “opt-down” options instead of forcing them to unsubscribe.
Test new creative or messaging with smaller sample groups before scaling.
Don’t:
Send to third party, purchased or dormant lists
Reactivate old segments without a re-permission strategy outside of campaigns
Change sending domains without a well-thought-out and phased warm-up plan
Ignore warning signs like rising bounce and spam complaint rates or declining open rates
Holiday email marketing is not a set-it-and-forget-it operation. Even high-performing senders can experience fluctuations in inbox placement, open rates, or complaints.
Keep a close watch on:
Bounce rate: Hard bounces above 2% signal data or list issues. Investigate immediately.
Complaint rate: Keep it below 0.1%. High complaints damage reputation fast.
Unsubscribe rate: A spike suggests your cadence or messaging may be off.
Open rates by domain: If Gmail opens drop sharply, but others stay steady, it may indicate inbox filtering specific to that provider.
Spam trap hits: Hitting recycled or inactive addresses means your list hygiene needs work.
Reputation data: Tools like Google Postmaster provide insights into domain health and spam reputation.
These numbers tell a story — one that can guide smarter, real-time adjustments.
Learn how Campaign Monitor’s Campaign Score feature helps you improve campaign performance with best practice benchmarks and personalized suggestions.
Bringing it all together
Landing in the inbox is no longer a guarantee — it’s a privilege earned through consistent, trustworthy practices. As you prepare for the holidays, focus on these four deliverability foundations:
Understand the system. Learn how MBPs evaluate senders and adapt your approach accordingly.
Guard your reputation. Build and maintain clean lists and engaged audiences.
Keep it steady. Avoid sudden spikes in send volume or frequency.
Watch your data. Monitor metrics constantly and act fast when something looks off.
The combination of smart strategy, authentic engagement and proactive monitoring sets you up for success—even in the busiest inbox season of the year.
Campaign Monitor makes these best practices easy to implement with intuitive tools that help you segment, automate, and analyze your messaging so you can focus on creating content your audiences want to open.
When done right, deliverability isn’t a technical hurdle—it’s the key to turning holiday emails into lasting customer relationships.
Ready to land in the inbox and make this your most successful season yet?
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Martech debt builds up through manual reporting, fragile integrations, and silos. These issues fragment customer data, break campaign attribution, and force teams to rely on shadow spreadsheets to fill gaps between platforms.
Current maturity models focus on technology adoption (hello AI!) rather than business outcomes. This misses the structural shift required to escape this cycle.
Semrush Enterprise evaluates maturity across five interconnected pillars:
Search
Traffic
Behavior
Social
Brand
Progress means moving from patchwork operations to a unified engine where insight, execution, and impact connect and scale together for strategic effect.
Marketing maturity progresses through five interconnected levels, each marked by deeper integration and growing automation roles across digital marketing specialties.
Level 1: Siloed
Teams hit individual goals but miss collective impact.
Teams operate as isolated units, protecting their own metrics while critical insights die inside departmental boundaries. Individual goals get hit while campaigns lose ground because no one understands cross-pillar impact.
Silos block productive feedback loops: teams deepen expertise but miss the compounding lift when signals transfer.
Isolated metrics become absolute targets (Goodhart’s Law), pushing teams to game numbers at the expense of real growth while eroding the unified experience customers expect.
At this level, every pillar runs its own optimization race, blind to system impact and blind to what real performance should look like. The results?
Fragmented customer data.
Inconsistent messaging across touchpoints.
Broken attribution.
Spot the symptoms of a siloed marketing department
Siloed operations generate specific, identifiable symptoms such as:
SEO and PPC campaigns run in parallel; no knowledge is shared.
Funnel drop-offs are reported but never explained.
PR teams measure media coverage volume but have no concept of SEO outcomes.
The content team drives engagement, but the data isn’t handed off, so no other team learns.
A viral TikTok case study presented by Mathilde Høj from TRANSACT Denmark at BrightonSEO demonstrated how TikTok content can dramatically impact search behavior and website traffic.
SEO and social media teams operated in silos, meaning when viral TikTok content drives massive search demand, the brand lacks the cross-functional collaboration needed to capitalize on it.
The disconnect becomes particularly costly when organic social teams identify what’s resonating with audiences in real-time, but paid/performance teams and SEO teams have no visibility into these insights to act quickly.
Ultimately, siloed workflows prevent brands from delivering a unified customer journey across discovery, consideration, and conversion.
Level 2: Connected
Faster problem solving and leaner workflows
At Level 2, teams connect some dots manually, creating symbiosis (i.e., interdependent relationships between search, traffic, behavior, social, and brand).
Campaigns can now pivot faster and answer “what’s working?” with a bit more clarity.
Leaner workflows, selective data sharing, and better targeting all drive sharper engagement and conversions.
In the real world, it can look something like this:
When social media shares drive engagement signals to content optimized for search.
SEO often gains from brand awareness campaigns that increase branded search volume, even when brand teams don’t optimize specifically for organic search.
Search engines value cross-channel signals: social media interactions generate social signals that indirectly influence SEO through increased content reach and backlink opportunities. When users share and engage with content across platforms, it signals relevance and authority. Social media profiles now appear in search engine results pages (SERPs), creating additional brand touchpoints.
Quick win: Pair up two specialties for a quarterly project. Demand a shared outcome and document what worked.
Integrated marketing teams hit revenue and scaling goals faster because every team stays focused on shared objectives while customizing tactics to get the best results for each channel.
Every specialist knows where their work plugs into the pipeline.
Real-time feedback and joint campaign planning become the new default and help achieve compounding results.
Concrete example: automated internal linking
Picsart, a creative design platform serving millions of users across 17 languages, identified pages needing optimization but lacked a systematic way to prioritize internal linking. Scaling manually across 300+ pages would have consumed 12,500+ hours.
Semrush Enterprise’s Link Recommender deployed 50,000+ contextual links in one week, creating pathways that matched user intent at different journey stages: visitors researching “photo editing” could now flow seamlessly to specific feature pages, then to templates.
Senior Product Manager Niels Kaspers emphasized the automation didn’t eliminate the team’s role: it shifted them from tactical linking grunt work to strategic content prioritization and forecasting which new pages would deliver more clicks.
This demonstrates how Level 3 automation builds bridges between user behavior insights and technical execution while freeing capacity for strategic work.
Level 4: Predictive
Algorithms detect patterns and forecast outcomes faster than human analysis, enabling proactive resource allocation before opportunities close or risks materialize.
AI forecasts outcomes before execution, freeing strategic capacity
AI models connect signals across pillars to forecast outcomes before they materialize. At this level, the marketing system stops reacting to what happened and starts preparing for what will happen.
Predictive analytics builds on integrated foundations, using cross-channel patterns to anticipate customer behavior, campaign performance, and revenue trajectories before teams execute.
Instead of fixing problems after they occur, predictive systems surface trends, redirect resources in real time, and enable proactive intervention.
What predictive looks like in practice with Square
What previously took months of manual analysis now happens in seconds. When algorithm updates hit or traffic drops, Square’s teams can open Semrush Enterprise, run the “What Has Happened” automation, and respond before competitors even understand what changed.
Predictive SEO forecasting shows:
Which content optimizations will move rankings.
Which markets offer untapped opportunity.
Where competitors are gaining ground.
Systems identify high-impact opportunities across markets and channels automatically, then surface them to teams for strategic execution rather than waiting for manual discovery.
Running AI-powered content audits allowed visibility of the competitive gaps and opportunities, which could immediately be deployed into their predictive SEO forecasts. Now they could understand which content changes would move rankings most, allowing prioritization of high-impact optimizations rather than guessing.
These could then instantly be shared across their nine global markets to scale the impact.
The system surfaced “high-impact opportunities across markets” that Square’s human team hadn’t detected, enabling the company to adapt strategies, optimize content, and capture growth opportunities in real time ahead of competitors.
Level 5: Autonomous
Spend time on growth, not management.
The autonomous marketing system self-optimizes across all pillars with minimal human input: spend, content, reporting, and optimization adjust in real time without manual intervention. Teams step in by exception when strategic judgment, creative vision, or crisis response requires human expertise.
Most marketing organizations remain at Levels 2–3. A 2025 automation maturity study found that autonomous operations require foundational work most companies have not completed:
Fully integrated cross-channel data.
Machine learning models trained on business-specific outcomes.
Governance frameworks defining when systems act independently versus escalating to humans.
Autonomous marketing requires clean, connected data flowing across every channel. This requirement conflicts with the fragmented martech stacks most teams use.
Signals of autonomous operation:
Campaigns run fully automated with optimization loops adjusting creative, targeting, and budget allocation without manual input.
Budgets shift automatically based on real-time ROI calculations, freeing teams to innovate rather than manage spreadsheets.
Brand monitoring runs continuously, flagging humans only when risk thresholds are breached.
Crisis playbooks trigger automatically from AI pattern detection, replacing reactive emergency meetings.
What if autonomous operation feels distant?
Identify one high-volume, low-complexity marketing task and automate it with clear exception rules defining when the system escalates to a human.
Document decision triggers that remain human-only:
Brand messaging approval.
Crisis response.
Budget reallocation above certain thresholds.
Most organizations will operate as hybrid systems for years, with autonomous operations handling defined tasks while humans manage judgment calls, cross-functional strategy, and organizational change required to reach full integration.
Marketing maturity is not a technology checklist
Organizations stuck buying tools without integrating systems perpetuate the martech debt cycle. This fragments data and burns out teams while competitors who build connected foundations capture compounding returns.
The path forward starts with an honest assessment: identify which level describes current operations. Then, focus on one cross-functional integration project that demonstrates symbiotic value.
Progress happens through deliberate structural shifts (e.g., connecting silos, establishing shared KPIs, automating tactical work) not through adding another platform to an already fragmented stack.
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AI search isn’t killing SEO. It’s forcing it to evolve into a new, multi-platform discipline called search everywhere optimization, where social and user-generated content (UGC) are the new trust engines driving discoverability.
When I presented this concept at brightonSEO San Diego, what stood out wasn’t just the excitement around AI.
What stood out was the unexpected convergence of ideas across sessions. You might expect every talk to center on AI, yet a broader shift was quietly taking shape.
Across these discussions, one message echoed clearly: social and UGC now shape which brands audiences trust and engage with.
Below are four recurring themes from those talks, along with post-event insights from each speaker on how marketers can apply a search everywhere mindset.
1. Search is not a platform, it’s a behavior
Search no longer lives in one box – and users aren’t just Googling anymore. They’re discovering through:
Conversations.
Communities.
Creators.
While AI platforms are becoming part of that journey, much of it still happens where authentic discussions thrive: Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram, to name a few.
Search has never been more multi-platform, multi-touch, or multi-intent.
Marketers must now adapt to fragmented journeys that may start socially, evolve through AI, and end in branded discovery.
Garg, founder and CEO of Writesonic, said it well when he recently shared with me:
“Your website is no longer your main asset – your presence across the entire web is. Brands optimizing only for Google are missing 40% of their audience who’ve already moved to ‘search everywhere.’”
My presentation defined this concept as search everywhere optimization, emphasizing that success depends on SEO, social, PR, and brand teams working together to drive unified discoverability.
Other speakers echoed these points, even if they used different language.
Liddell defines this similarly as “search everywhere” – where social, brand, and search operate together to drive discoverability.
Hudgens said, “Social is evolving to become the new open web,” citing data showing traffic and engagement growth from social ecosystems.
Blyskal quantified the behavior: AI platforms cite Reddit and YouTube way more than any traditional websites. More proof that discovery has evolved beyond Google’s SERP.
In speaking with Blyskal, head of AI strategy and research at Profound, he noted:
“Search everywhere isn’t a trend anymore, it’s reality. Our data shows that consumers are asking ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity the same questions they used to ask Google, but the answers are being built from fundamentally different sources. UGC platforms like Reddit now drive more influence in AI recommendations than most corporate websites because they represent unfiltered human experience at scale.”
2. UGC and social content drive modern discovery
User-generated content and social discourse have become the connective tissue of search.
From product reviews to LinkedIn posts to Reddit threads, these conversations shape what AI and many humans believe to be authoritative.
Social platforms are now the front door to search intent, sparking curiosity and building interest that eventually leads users to branded and organic experiences.
Blyskal’s analysis of 40 million AI search results found Reddit to be the single most-cited domain across ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity.
While some shifts have occurred recently, he confirmed on Oct. 21 that “Reddit is still the most cited website overall in AI and is still second in ChatGPT.”
Garg echoed this finding, noting that Reddit and other community-driven content dominate citations across industries – a clear signal for marketers to engage where real conversations happen.
Liddell’s award-winning BullyBillows case study demonstrated how social-first content can drive measurable SEO impact, including:
A 65% rise in brand searches.
A 195% increase in “brand + keyword” searches.
A 139% lift in revenue.
Reynolds likewise emphasized the value of social resonance, recommending that marketers invest in content that performs well on social platforms, even if it underperforms in organic search.
Seer Interactive’s own data backs this up: while social generates 89% less traffic than search, it produces 20% more leads.
Together, this data proves that social and UGC are not just amplification channels. They’re search inputs themselves, and a core component of search everywhere optimization.
In a follow-up conversation, Hudgens – founder and CEO of Siege Media – remarked:
“Search traffic to LinkedIn pages is up significantly, and I expect it to continue to grow, eventually coming close to Reddit and Quora in impact on B2B. Brands need to be considering how they show up and contribute on LinkedIn in order to best impact all search surfaces.”
Many are seeing this firsthand in their analytics – clicks are declining even when rankings remain steady.
The real goal now is preference: being chosen, not just seen.
Both humans and AI systems increasingly value authenticity and consensus over keyword precision and link quantity.
Today, search visibility depends as much on how others describe your brand as on the content you create yourself.
Liddell frames this shift through the lens of preference = authority + trust + relevance.
Reynolds highlights the rise of community platforms – LinkedIn, Reddit, Slack, and WhatsApp – urging SEOs to focus on spaces where people share content with personal endorsement, offering more genuine reach than traditional formats that dominate the SERP.
Hudgens describes the 2021–2026 content marketing evolution from “high DR (domain rating) links” to “high influence mentions,” signaling that social proof and reputation now act as the modern PageRank.
Garg quantifies it: AI now weighs third-party mentions three times higher than a brand’s own website.
In short, as search engines are learning to mirror people, they trust signals, not tactics. This is the preference component of search everywhere optimization.
Liddell, co-founder and Search Everywhere director at Deviation, summarized it nicely to me, sharing:
“Brands can’t win on rankings alone anymore; they win on trust. Modern discovery happens where people talk, not where algorithms dictate – and that means investing in authentic UGC and social visibility is as critical to search as backlinks once were.”
4. Search everywhere success starts with breaking down silos
In 2025, silos remain one of the biggest obstacles to growth.
Many of our clients experience this firsthand – and other industry experts agree that maximizing discoverability now depends on cross-functional collaboration.
Search teams can no longer operate in isolation. PR, brand, and social teams all feed the trust loop that AI, search engines, and users rely on.
Future success will depend on these groups meeting regularly, sharing ideas, and aligning on shared goals.
My presentation emphasized building cross-channel roadmaps with social, content, PR, and paid to ensure each team’s efforts reinforce each other.
Hudgens showed that the future of content marketing lies in blending PR, organic social, thought leadership, and SEO – creating compounding impact instead of treating them as separate channels.
Reynolds underscored the need for shared metrics, measuring impact not in rankings but in trust, reach, and conversion.
The new search equation runs on trust
While the speakers offered diverse perspectives, they all agreed on one central truth: search success is shifting from gaming algorithms to authentically earning audience trust.
Reddit posts, offsite reviews, social media, and third-party references now serve as critical trust signals – not because they link, but because they validate and build confidence in a brand.
This shift – evident across all four takeaways, from breaking down silos to valuing preference over ranking – underscores a broader reality: search isn’t something people do anymore.
It’s something they experience, everywhere.
The brands that will thrive in this new era won’t be those with the most backlinks or the sharpest keyword strategy, but those whose audiences genuinely connect with and vouch for them.
Grappling with innovation and changing consumer attitudes is second nature to marketers, who have already lived through many technological shifts over the past two decades. But forecasting where things are going is especially hard when it comes to modern AI, which has such unusual, non-deterministic properties. You can’t just extrapolate from the state of AI today to understand where AI is going to be in five years (or one…); during this sort of a platform shift, you need to take a deeper first-principles look.
Some things won’t change. Consumers will always want products, services and experiences that resonate and meet their needs. Marketers will always want easier, faster and more effective ways to connect with consumers. But the technologies that mediate that relationship are primed to shift in the coming years in major, unprecedented ways — impacting how marketers do their work, and the customer experiences they’re able to deliver.
How the marketer experience will evolve: Less rote work, more creativity
The history of marketing is built around constant evolution. But the scale and complexity of the change triggered by the rise of modern AI may test even seasoned customer engagement teams. To thrive, marketers need to open themselves up to new skills, perspectives and capabilities that will allow them to do more with less.
This change is already underway. As marketers take advantage of AI, they’re spending less time on rote tasks (like manual message creation) and more on strategy and creative work — from brainstorming innovative campaigns to deepening their testing and optimization strategy. These efficiency gains will grow as AI becomes a more prominent part of the customer engagement process, allowing brands to set goals and guardrails, then empowering their AI solutions to independently consume context, make decisions, and act on marketers’ behalf.
Today, that might look like training basic agents on your brand’s voice to ensure that message content is consistently on brand. But as we gain trust in AI’s ability to operate unsupervised over longer time horizons and to handle complex projects, more marketers will be able to shift their focus to strategy and effective management of the AI resources at their disposal to enable AI decisioning and other essential optimizations.
How team experiences will evolve: Humans and AI agents working side by side
Marketing is a collaborative art, where building a successful customer engagement program often depends as much or more on marketers’ ability to work together effectively as it does on their individual skills. But while AI may help marketers to work with internal stakeholders more effectively, its biggest unlock is the ability to be a direct “teammate” to marketers themselves. And by leveraging AI’s ability to create countless agents that can support customer engagement, even entry-level marketers will likely find themselves essentially operating as a “manager” of a team of autonomous subordinates.
Imagine creating a whole team of agents, with one tasked with personalizing product recommendations, one that QAs messages to ensure they’re formatted and built correctly, one that handles translations and another that reports back at the first sign of campaign underperformance. By supplementing your existing capabilities with agents, you aren’t just reducing the burden on yourself and your human colleagues; you’re also building a digital institutional memory, training these “teammates” with context and goals and reward functions to be able to keep supporting your efforts and driving value even as human coworkers come and go and your team’s goals shift and evolve with time.
AI and customer engagement: How brands can win the future
For years, marketers have sought the ability to truly personalize communication on a 1:1 basis across an audience of millions, and to do it swiftly, efficiently and at scale. This was the Holy Grail of marketing, but due to the limitations of technology it simply wasn’t achievable for even the most advanced teams. That’s all being made possible by AI decisioning, a powerful new type of functionality that can force multiply brands’ marketing performance and creative impact while delivering what their customers want and need.
Previously, a brand trying to win back lapsing customers had a long journey ahead of it. It might start by leveraging a churn propensity model to identify which customers are most likely to churn, then use a product prediction model to figure out what products to highlight in order to tempt them to return. From there, they’d need to run a series of A/B tests in order to figure out which offers and channels will work best. But while taking that approach is a traditional best practice, it only got brands so far — they could target micro-segments on the right channel with the right offer, but truly 1:1 engagement was still out of reach.
AI decisioning represents a new way forward when it comes to personalization. This approach leverages reinforcement learning, where AI agents learn from consumer behavior and learn over time how to maximize rewards (such as conversions or purchases) in order to optimize the KPIs that have the biggest impact through ongoing, autonomous experimentation. That means AI decisioning can seamlessly determine not only the next best product offer for those lapsing users, but also the best channel, the optimal time of day or day of week, the frequency that makes the most sense, the message most likely to drive ideal outcomes, and any other dimension that could impact whether a recipient takes a given action.
Even better, because AI agents are constantly experimenting in the background, the model can continuously adapt to shifting consumer preferences and behavior. And because these models use first-party data about every available customer characteristic, AI decisioning makes it possible to engage with individuals in a true 1:1 way, rather than relying on segments. The result is exceptional relevance and responsive experiences for individual consumers, something that’s only possible because of AI.
Final thoughts
With any major technology shift, it isn’t enough to just plan for the obvious outcomes — you must ensure you can react effectively to the changes that no one knows are coming. To succeed, brands need to pay careful attention to the arc of this new technology. Responding to a platform shift can’t be a one-and-done thing, and brands that create a five-year plan without building in regular pulse points and adjustments are going to quickly find themselves falling behind their more agile, flexible peers.
To see the full benefit of AI in their customer engagement efforts, brands also need to look beyond AI. After all, AI isn’t a shortcut, it’s an amplifier — and the AI you use for customer engagement is only ever going to be as good as the infrastructure supporting it. An exceptional AI feature isn’t going to feel exceptional to consumers if it’s built on architecture that can’t take action in real time or can only deliver experiences in a single, prescribed way. Make sure your AI tools are built on a strong foundation and have the infrastructure they need to shine; otherwise, you may never fully achieve what’s possible.
Curious to learn more about how Braze is thinking about AI and customer engagement? Check out our BrazeAIᵀᴹ page.
Meet the DOOGEE U12, the company’s new Android tablet. It is a direct successor to the DOOGEE U11, which received Android 16 two months ago. The DOOGEE U12 is now here, and it can handle anything you throw at it, basically.
The DOOGEE U12 is here, the company’s brand new tablet
DOOGEE says that the tablet is made for both “busy students and families”, as it’s made for both work and play. The company also announced the worldwide release of this tablet, and we have a special offer for you, which we’ll talk about at the very end.
This tablet has a large 12-inch 2K IPS display, which offers a 90Hz refresh rate. This display is also larger than the one on its predecessor. You’re also getting Certified Eye Comfort technology here, to protect your eyes.
There is a 9,000mAh battery included on the inside, and DOOGEE says it’s an “all-day battery”, as in you won’t have to charge it no matter what you end up doing. It can also charge other devices, act as a power bank.
It comes with expandable RAM and storage
The Unisoc T7255 octa-core chip fuels this device, while you get 6GB of RAM. You can expand that up to 24GB via virtual RAM, though. DOOGEE included 128GB of storage here, though you can expand that up to 2TB via a microSD card.
Android 16 comes pre-installed on this tablet, by the way, the latest version of Android OS. There is also a ‘VIP Edition’ of the tablet that comes with a suite of accessories. Those accessories include a Bluetooth keyboard, a stylus, a mouse, a tempered glass screen protector, and a protective cover.
You’ll also notice that the bezels around the display are not too thin or too thick, which is always nice to see.
You can save quite a bit of cash thanks to these coupons
With that being said, you can purchase this tablet via Amazon as we speak. We also have a 30% off coupon (£100) +5% off code for you to use, in order to get a very nice discount. You’ll see both the purchase link and codes listed below. You can get the tablet with free shipping and an extended warranty. If you’d like to know more about the company’s products, visit DOOGEE’s official website.
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