From Publishing Pages to Brand Visibility
I recorded this video standing on a beach, and that wasn’t accidental.
When you look out across a beach, the first thing that strikes you is just how much sand there is. Endless grains, stretching as far as you can see. And that’s exactly how I think about content on the internet as we head into 2026.
There is already an overwhelming amount of content online. Every brand, every organisation, every team is publishing more pages, more posts, more “stuff”. And yet, despite all of that effort, many brands are becoming less visible, not more. That’s the core problem CMS owners and digital leaders need to grapple with right now.
The way people find content has changed
For a long time, discovery followed a fairly predictable model. People searched for keywords, scanned lists of links, and clicked through to websites. SEO mattered. Performance mattered. Getting the basics right could still carry you a long way.
That world hasn’t disappeared, but it’s no longer the whole story.
We’re now seeing a clear shift in how audiences behave. Instead of searching for keywords, people are asking questions. They’re going to tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and other AI-powered experiences to get answers, recommendations, and guidance.
That shift is subtle, but it’s profound.
People aren’t discovering content by browsing pages anymore. They’re consuming answers. And increasingly, those answers are assembled, summarised, and surfaced by machines before a human ever sees them.
SEO isn’t dead — but it’s not enough
This is usually where someone asks, “So is SEO dead?”
No. Of course it isn’t.
You still need to optimise your content. You still need to care about performance, relevance, and clarity. Those fundamentals absolutely matter.
But there’s an important difference between optimising for search engines and being recognised by AI-driven systems.
In the past, if you didn’t quite get SEO right, you could often compensate. You could spend money, buy reach, and still show up in front of the right audience.
With LLMs and agents, that safety net disappears.
You can’t pay your way into an answer. You either show up or you don’t.
Machines decide what gets surfaced
This is the real shift that many CMS strategies haven’t caught up with yet.
Humans are no longer the first decision-makers in discovery. Machines are.
Agents and LLMs decide:
• which sources to trust
• which content to reference
• which brands to surface
• and which answers to ignore
That means the question CMS owners should be asking is no longer:
“Did we publish the content?”
It’s:
“Did we show up… for the right questions… with the right answer… in a way that can be trusted?”
If the answer to that is unclear, you have a visibility problem, not a content problem.
From publishing pages to brand visibility
This is where I think CMS owners need to make a deliberate pivot.
Historically, success was measured in outputs:
• pages published
• campaigns launched
• content volumes increased
In 2026, those metrics are increasingly disconnected from outcomes.
What matters now is brand visibility.
Not visibility in the vague sense of “we exist”, but visibility in the specific, machine-mediated sense of:
• being recognised as a credible source
• being referenced consistently
• being aligned to clear intent
• and being trusted enough to surface in answers
If machines don’t recognise your brand, people won’t either.
Brand visibility has to become a practice
This isn’t a one-off optimisation exercise.
The organisations that are starting to succeed here are treating visibility as an ongoing practice — something that becomes part of how content is planned, created, measured, and improved.
That means:
• setting clear goals for how you want to show up
• understanding the questions you’re trying to influence
• checking whether you’re appearing at all
• validating whether the answers are correct
• and then actively optimising content based on what you learn
Not just measuring for reporting’s sake — but actually doing something with the insight.
AI isn’t just changing discovery — it’s changing production
There’s an interesting flip side to all of this.
The same shift that’s changing how consumers find content is also changing how content gets created internally.
AI and agent-based tools are starting to lower the barrier to participation. Instead of creating a brief and handing it off to a specialist, more people can be involved earlier in the process, working alongside agents that help generate, structure, and refine content.
That doesn’t remove the need for expertise — it amplifies it.
Specialists can spend more time optimising the experience, improving quality, and reinforcing trust, instead of just pushing content through workflows.
Done well, this becomes a genuine advantage.
Looking ahead
We’re only at the beginning of this shift.
In future posts and videos, I want to go deeper into what this looks like in practice — the technology, the patterns, and the mistakes I see organisations making as they try to adapt.
For now, the takeaway is simple:
The internet already has enough content.
How will you continue to ensure your brand is visible?