Editor’s Note:
This article is part of a Digital Summit Collective series where we’re turning standout live sessions from recent Digital Summit events into actionable, on-demand insights for our community. Each piece is adapted from a real stage presentation—capturing the ideas, examples, and strategic thinking that resonated most with attendees.
As AI transforms how customers discover brands, authentic marketing remains the key to earning trust, building credibility, and driving lasting growth.
The rise of AI has sparked a new race among marketers. Teams are experimenting with generative search optimization, tracking AI citations, and asking an increasingly common question: How do we get our brand to show up in ChatGPT?
Visibility certainly matters. Customers can't choose a brand they never discover.
Yet during his keynote at Digital Summit Denver, Wil Reynolds encouraged marketers to look beyond the first impression. Visibility creates an opportunity, but it has never guaranteed trust. As AI becomes a larger part of the customer journey, the brands that stand out will be the ones that combine technological innovation with authentic marketing that genuinely helps people.
For years, search marketers have optimized content around algorithms, rankings, and keywords. AI is introducing a new set of platforms, but Reynolds cautioned against repeating the same pattern.
Many organizations are producing large volumes of AI-generated content designed to increase visibility as quickly as possible. While those pages may generate impressions and citations, they often provide little value to the people reading them. Customers can recognize content created to satisfy an algorithm just as easily as they recognize content created to answer a real question.
Marketing has always involved more than being found. Brands also have to earn credibility, communicate expertise, and give customers confidence that they are the right choice. AI has changed where those interactions begin, but it has not changed the importance of authenticity once they do.
One of Reynolds' strongest arguments centered on how marketers choose to use AI in the first place.
Rather than relying on it to produce endless streams of content, he encouraged marketers to use AI as a research partner. Customer interviews, sales calls, online communities, and AI prompts all reveal how people describe their challenges in their own words. Those insights often differ dramatically from the language marketers use internally.
When brands build messaging around real customer conversations, the content naturally becomes more relevant, more believable, and ultimately more persuasive.
AI is remarkably effective at organizing information, identifying patterns, and uncovering insights across thousands of conversations. Those capabilities create an opportunity to better understand customers instead of simply publishing more content.
Reynolds also challenged marketers to rethink how they evaluate success.
AI visibility is relatively easy to track, but visibility alone says very little about whether marketing is influencing business outcomes. A brand may appear in more AI-generated responses while customer engagement, direct traffic, or revenue remain unchanged.
Instead, Reynolds encouraged marketers to measure what happens after discovery. Direct visits, branded searches, referrals, customer inquiries, and conversions all provide stronger signals that customers are moving from awareness to consideration.
Perhaps his most compelling point was that organizations should treat trust as a meaningful business metric. Every marketing decision has the potential to strengthen or weaken credibility, especially as AI makes it easier to publish content at unprecedented scale. Brands that focus exclusively on visibility may find themselves sacrificing the very trust that turns prospects into customers.
What to do right now
The bottom line
AI is changing how customers discover information, but it has not changed why people choose one brand over another.
Trust, expertise, and authenticity continue to shape buying decisions long after the first search result or AI citation appears. Marketers who embrace AI while remaining grounded in genuine customer understanding will be better positioned to build lasting relationships and sustainable growth.
Technology will continue to evolve. Great marketing will continue to begin with people.
Watch the Full Session
This article was adapted from the live session Optimizing AI and Authenticity to Win in 2026 presented by Wil Reynolds, Seer Interactive at the Denver Digital Summit 2026
Watch the full video: