Achieving brand visibility in the era of AI-search, Justin Cook | Evolve Digital Toronto 2026
Summary
Justin Cook, President of 9thCO, a technical SEO firm founded in 2013, delivered a session at Evolve Digital Toronto 2026 arguing that AI search represents a fundamental behavioral shift in how people discover information online — and that traditional SEO tactics are increasingly insufficient to capture that visibility.
Cook opened by framing AI search not as a technology trend but as a new human behavior. With nearly one billion weekly ChatGPT users, zero-click searches are rising sharply, and the classic customer journey — query, SERP, click, consider, purchase — is being replaced by synthesized AI answers that may produce no clicks at all. He noted that users have begun anthropomorphizing AI tools (nicknaming ChatGPT 'Chad'), a first in human history, which signals deep psychological stickiness and likely further growth.
A central point was debunking the myth that LLMs index the web in real time. Cook explained that LLMs are trained on a fixed corpus of data up to a cutoff date. When a question exceeds the model's confidence, it fires a retrieval mechanism — decomposing the query into sub-queries, hitting a search API (Bing for ChatGPT, Google for Gemini), fetching relevant pages, extracting content, and synthesizing a response. He stressed there is no ranking algorithm inside AI search tools — the goal is to be trusted enough to be retrieved.
To address this, Cook introduced 9thCO's four-part framework: Eligibility, Authority, Compressibility, and Association. Eligibility concerns technical crawlability — fast page loads, server-side rendering, static site generation, and edge CDN hosting all improve the likelihood that a crawler can extract a site's content. Client-side rendering, lazy loading, and infinite scrolling can render content invisible to crawlers. Authority is about genuine trust signals rather than gaming link schemes — Cook described how 9thCO shifted from paying for backlinks on generic blogs to sponsoring technology events and open-source JavaScript frameworks, embedding their brand in authentic, contextually relevant sources. Editorial mentions, PR, knowledge hubs, directory listings like Clutch, and podcast transcripts all contribute to authority in answer engine optimization (AEO). Compressibility refers to factual entropy — how efficiently content can be reduced to its essential facts without losing accuracy. Well-structured title tags, clear headings, internal linking, web accessibility standards, and FAQs all improve compressibility and map to how AI agents structure responses. Association means AI systems understanding when a brand is relevant — schema markup, organizational data, and clear service definitions help AI determine when to surface a particular brand in response to a given query.
Cook also previewed emerging agentic standards: MCP (Model Context Protocol), which lets brands expose their product data and booking tooling directly within AI interfaces, and UCP, a consortium protocol backed by Google, Shopify, Target, and Walmart to enable agentic commerce.
He closed with a practical audit roadmap: prompt evaluation (identifying common queries your brand should qualify for), technical infrastructure audit (far deeper than traditional SEO audits), and KPI adjustment — accepting that organic traffic volume will decline, refocusing analytics on intent-based traffic and share of voice within AI-generated responses.
Key Takeaways
- •LLMs do not index the web in real time — they retrieve content only when confidence is low, so there is no algorithm to chase inside AI tools; the goal is to be trusted enough to be retrieved.
- •Traditional content marketing aimed at top-of-funnel SEO traffic is increasingly ineffective as AI search handles initial discovery; shift focus to the bottom of the funnel where AI-referred visitors are pre-qualified and spend significantly more time on site.
- •Pass the Eligibility test by maximizing page speed, using server-side or static site generation, and avoiding client-side rendering and infinite scroll — these block AI crawlers from extracting your content.
- •Build Authority through genuine, contextually relevant brand placements — sponsor industry events, contribute to open-source projects, earn editorial mentions and podcast transcript references — rather than generic link schemes.
- •Improve Compressibility by structuring content with clear title tags, headings, internal links, FAQs, and web accessibility standards; these reduce ambiguity and map to how AI agents format their responses.
- •Establish Association using schema markup, organizational data, and clearly defined services so AI systems know when to surface your brand for relevant queries.
- •Conduct a prompt evaluation audit: identify the complex, conversational queries common in your market and assess whether your brand would appear — and whether your website even contains the data needed to qualify.
- •Audit back-end infrastructure beyond traditional SEO: rendering pipeline, caching, CDN hosting, and data governance (e.g., structured supplier data) all affect AI retrievability.
- •Prepare for MCP and UCP: brands that expose product data and transactional tooling via these open protocols will be bookable and discoverable directly within AI chat interfaces.
Transcript
Okay, now we're going to get started. Hey everybody, >> now let's go ahead and uh get started. So, my name is Rich Lawson uh from Evolving Web and today um we're really excited to welcome Justin Cook um to Evolve Digital and uh Justin is the president of Ninthco and he's going to spend uh the time with us uh talking a little bit about um the underlying technical uh fundamentals that really break through all of the you know noise in AI and with uh search optimization. So, everybody please join me...
