Think about the last time you needed a tradesperson you could trust. A plumber, say, or someone to sort the boiler before winter.
You probably didn't type "best plumber near me" and pick the top result. You asked someone. A neighbour, a friend, the family group chat. And whoever answered didn't check that plumber's website first. They didn't look at the meta description or count the keywords. They just said, "Use Dave. He's good, he turns up, he doesn't rip you off."
That's the picture Alex Myers, founder and CEO of Manifest, painted to close aiblLIVE in London on 20 October. His line was simple: "Your friends didn't check your backlinks."
This was the idea that stuck with me most.
Humans and machines, same judgement
Alex's point is that the way AI tools recommend a business is getting closer and closer to the way people do. As he put it, "humans and machines start to use the same judgement" when they make a recommendation.
Your friend didn't check your backlinks, he said. They didn't check which words you used when you asked. "They understood you and the context."
The AI now tries to do the same thing. It reads far more than any of us could, then tries to make the call a well-informed friend would make. Which means the old question, "how do I rank?", is turning into a much older one. Would someone who knows the area recommend me?
His advice for answering it was to stop fiddling with content tactics and "go upstream" to brand strategy. For a man who works in this world, that was quite an admission.
What this means if you run a small business
I've been building websites since 1994 and I've done my share of SEO. Keywords, page titles, the lot. A lot of that still matters, because a site that a machine can't read is a site nobody finds.
But I came away from this session more convinced than ever of something I already believed. Brand is more important.
A lot of small businesses spend their time chasing leads. Another ad, another funnel, another offer. What they're not doing is building brand. Not building reputation. Not building trust. And that's exactly what a friend draws on when they make a recommendation. It now looks like it's what the machine draws on too.
Most people think of brand as a logo and some colours. It's much simpler than that. It's what people say about you when you're not in the room. Reviews. Word of mouth. The story a happy customer tells over dinner. A mention in the local paper. A podcast where someone else says your name.
None of that comes from your own website. All of it comes from doing good work and giving people a reason to talk about it.
What changes when you get this right
Just imagine someone in your town asks ChatGPT or Copilot who they should call for exactly what you do. A proper question, with their location and their worries baked in.
What would it mean for your business if your name came up because the internet is full of people saying good things about you? No ad spend. No tricks. Just a reputation doing its job while you get on with yours.
That's what's worth working towards. The lead chasing gets easier, because the trust is already there before anyone picks up the phone.
If you want to hear your brand the way a friend would describe it, try one question on a few of your happiest customers. "If a friend asked you about us, what would you say?"
Their exact words are your brand, in the language people actually use. I'd love to know how close they come to what's on your website.
