My number one tip for 2026 is the same tip I would have given in 2016: audience-first marketing wins. It’s not a new concept, but with AI search, agentic search, and the way discovery is fragmenting across platforms, it’s more critical than ever.
The only way to thrive through these shifts is to deeply understand how the people you’re trying to reach actually search for and find brands. That sounds simple. Yet, it’s not what most brands are doing.
Read on for how I’d approach solving this, or watch the full conversation here.
The Persona Problem
Most brands aren’t terrible at knowing who their audience is. But traditional persona mapping produces wildly generic outputs. There’s a meme that compares Ozzy Osbourne and Prince Charles. On a persona map, they look identical. Old. English. Rich. But obviously, they’re into wildly different things.
That’s the core problem with only using focus groups and demographic bucketing to understand your audiences. You take 10 to 20 people, extrapolate, and end up with personas that look precise on paper but tell you nothing about how people actually behave.
The fix is using real-world search data to map what your audience actually cares about and how their needs show up in their searches across any search platform they use.
How to Map Audience to Search Data
What I recommend is really understanding the entire customer search journey.
Say you’re a shoe company. If someone is a nurse on their feet all day, they have a very specific need: shoes that last a very long time. You start mapping that to what someone in that position would actually search for.
But you don’t stop at Google. That nurse was probably influenced by a TikTok creator who happens to be a nurse, or go to an Amazon review search and search for “nurse” to see if fellow nurses like them. You can pull search data from all of these platforms and start to understand how that audience member is searching and being influenced across the entire journey.
Then you tie it back to intent. What type of content and what call to action makes sense for where that person is in their journey? At Brainlabs, we call this process our Digital Signals Analyzer, and it’s where the real strategy begins.
Buying intent matters, but it’s not the only goal. We know that brand decisions can be made even when someone isn’t actively in the market. The key is mapping the right content to the right moment.
Why This Matters Even More in the Age of AI Search
Every brand should have multiple audiences. In my experience, that’s what usually drives brand success. I’d break down your search journey and keyword research by each audience, then layer those onto your strategy individually.
The later stages of the buyer journey might converge. But because you’re targeting different audiences, the top of the funnel (landing pages, messaging, content formats) should be distinct.
This is especially important in AI search. Someone on ChatGPT or another LLM is typically logged in. The AI remembers previous searches, and Gemini has now unveiled personalized search. If it knows that the person is a nurse with disposable income who likes hiking, it’s going to recommend a different shoe than what surfaces from a generic Google search for “nurse shoes.”
That’s the value of knowing your audience through and through and building personalized content that signals to AI search engines exactly who you serve.
Start With Where Your Audience Already Is
Understanding your audience means extending research beyond Google. I always start with tools like SparkToro to see what social channels and platforms an audience is spending time on.
Reddit, for example, tends to be a major one. Its rise within Google search results has been significant, and it’s also one of the most cited sources within LLMs. Your audience is already there, having real conversations about the things you want to be known for. That’s a bridge worth building between organic strategy and where real influence happens.
The Brands That Will Win
The technology is advancing. AI search is here. Agentic search is coming. But the fundamental truth hasn’t changed.
The brands that will thrive are the ones that stop treating personas as demographic exercises and start treating them as behavior maps. The ones that extend research beyond Google. The ones that understand their audiences well enough to meet them wherever they are, whether that’s Reddit, TikTok, or an AI agent making decisions on their behalf.
Start with the audience. That’s not just good SEO. That’s good marketing.
