Ray Saddiq shares that you need to be both recognisable and discoverable in 2026.

Ray says: “If you want to seriously influence your consumer moving forward, brand alone is not going to cut it.

We got into this mindset that brand was going to be key to driving SEO success, and it plays a huge part, but if you want to grow and stay top-of-mind, you need to drive demand and be discoverable. It's not just an awareness thing anymore. You need a combination of both. It's not enough to be known; you need to be found as well.

That means building brand and category salience. You've got to own your category in search so that, moving forward – with LLMs, AI search, and social search – you are the brand that has salience to the category that you want to be known for. You’re the one most closely related to that category.

This can’t just happen across Google. This needs to be across every searchable platform, because that's where intent starts now.”