Andrew Warden, Nicola Ponce and the best April Fools joke of the week
Credit where it’s due: Andrew Warden , Nicole Ponce and the Semrush team produced the smartest April Fools activation I saw all week.
On the surface, it was simple enough. Suddenly, Semrush people all over LinkedIn were presenting themselves as “Brand Visibility Experts,” with Andrew making it clear that, joke or not, the point was serious: in the AI era, brand visibility is no longer just an SEO task, it is an organisational one.
And that’s why the activation worked.
Because the best April Fools campaigns do not just make you laugh. They make you uncomfortable. They expose something true. They force you to wonder whether the joke is, in fact, a more accurate description of reality than the serious language everyone has been using for years.
That is exactly what SEMrush managed to do.
For a brief moment, half the industry was left asking the same question: is this parody, or is this the future?
My answer is both.
And that is why the campaign matters.
Because “brand visibility” is a far better description of where search, discovery and recommendation are heading than the exhausted old language of SEO, GEO, AEO, AI SEO, or whatever other acronym the industry has invented to avoid admitting the obvious.
Something fundamental has changed.
And the people fighting hardest against that change are not defending a craft. They are defending a business model.
The old SEO model is not under pressure. It is under indictment.
Let’s stop pretending this is a philosophical debate.
The real problem in the SEO industry is not that people disagree on terminology. The real problem is that, for years, a huge chunk of the industry has been selling something that was never quite as good as it claimed to be.
At its best, traditional SEO sold visibility. Rank higher, get seen more, attract more clicks, maybe generate more leads. Fine. Crude, but directionally fair.
At its worst, though, SEO gradually turned itself into a production line.
A bit of technical optimisation. A bit of on-page work. Some internal linking. Some metadata. And then the real revenue engine: content.
That became the model.
Not strategy. Not market orientation. Not brand building. Not serious positioning. Just monthly production. A couple of blog posts. Maybe four if the retainer was chunky enough. Some keywords mapped to some pages. A few backlinks, usually outsourced. A report at the end of the month with a few green arrows and a lot of hopeful language about future growth.
This is where the guru class built its empire.
And let’s be honest: most of the famous SEO voices online have never shown anything remotely close to serious marketing competence. In many cases, you have never seen a proper case study from them. No hard commercial evidence. No meaningful before-and-after. No proof of sustained business impact. Just a following, a framework, and a lot of recycled certainty.
That should have been a warning sign.
Instead, the industry elevated them anyway.
Most SEO agencies were never selling growth. They were selling output.
This is the part many people will hate, but tough shit.
A lot of SEO agencies did not build their economics on transformational work. They built them on scalable deliverables. Content was the margin machine. Writers were cheaper than senior technical SEOs. Retainers became easier to defend when there was visible “stuff” being produced every month. And so the whole industry leaned into the convenient fiction that content output itself was a growth strategy.
It wasn’t.
It was a deliverable.
And there’s a difference.
Do not misunderstand me. Content matters. Good content absolutely matters. If you are an expert accountant, solicitor, surgeon, software firm or agency, you should create content. It helps communicate expertise. It helps buyers understand what you do. It can support SEO, sales and brand. It can help shape the network around your business.
But that is not what much of the industry was doing.
What much of the industry was doing was industrialising content for keywords. That is a completely different proposition.
And once AI arrived, it exposed the weakness of that model in brutal fashion.
The barrier to producing content collapsed. The bottleneck did not.
Humans still have limited attention. They still do not want to read your sixteenth 2,000-word article on a topic they barely cared about in the first place. Publishing more and more informational content does not magically create more demand for it. It often just creates more digital landfill.
And when Google and AI interfaces began reducing the value of generic informational pages, the weakness of the model became impossible to ignore.
From traffic to citations is not progress. It is a humiliating downgrade.
Here is where the whole thing becomes faintly absurd.
When traffic was the KPI, at least you could argue there was some relationship between visibility and commercial opportunity. It was often abused, yes. It was manipulated, yes. But traffic, in principle, was still a sign that more people were encountering the brand.
Now look at what parts of the industry are selling instead.
Citations.
Not recommendations. Not selection. Not preference. Citations.
That is a downgrade so spectacular it should embarrass anyone serious about marketing.
The current Substack-and-LinkedIn obsession with “how to get cited by AI” has become one of the stupidest conversations in modern digital marketing. It confuses being included in a footnote with being chosen as the answer.
These are not the same thing.
Anyone who has spent more than five minutes using ChatGPT, Google’s AI experiences or similar systems can see that the cited links are not some complete record of everything used to generate the answer. They are directionally helpful references. They show part of the consideration set. They are useful clues, not the whole evidence chain.
And yet the industry has begun acting as though getting cited is the prize.
It isn’t.
The prize is being recommended.
The prize is being selected.
The prize is becoming the most probable, most credible, most fitting solution to a user’s problem.
That is a completely different challenge.
The real battle is no longer ranking. It is recommendation.
This is the point too many SEOs still do not grasp.
Traditional search worked in a relatively simple way from the user’s point of view. Humans typed broad queries. Search engines returned ranked pages. People were cognitive misers, so they mostly clicked page one and almost never page two. That gave ranking enormous commercial importance.
AI-mediated discovery changes that.
Now the system is not merely returning a ranked list and asking the human to do the comparison. It is doing more of the comparison itself. It is scooping up evidence, weighing signals, grounding where it can, and attempting to infer what the best or most useful answer is likely to be.
That means the old logic of “we rank, therefore we win” becomes much weaker.
Because the model is not only looking at your website. It is not only looking at the obvious keyword. It is not only looking at one static query. It is often dealing with richer prompts, hidden context, user-specific framing, and a wider pool of signals than many SEOs can see.
This is not a world in which one blog post wins the game.
This is a world in which brands are judged.
And if you are being judged, visibility matters. But so do the things that make you worthy of being visible.
Why I see this differently: police intelligence, evidence and networks
Part of the reason I have become increasingly bullish on this idea is because I do not come at it from a classic agency ladder.
I spent 20 years in the police, and around a decade of that was largely in intelligence work. My job was to understand networks, relationships, evidence and signals. To map activity. To disrupt organised criminal operations. To figure out what mattered, who mattered and why.
That changes how you see the world.
You stop thinking in neat little channel boxes and start thinking in systems.
You learn that networks explain more than most people realise. The brain is a network. Memory is a network. The internet is a network. Brands spread through networks. Influence moves through networks. AI itself, in practice, operates through relationships between signals, tokens, training patterns and grounded evidence in ways that are still only partially understood.
So when I look at search today, I do not see a neat SEO problem.
I see an evidence problem.
I see a visibility problem.
I see a network problem.
And that leads to two ideas I think the industry needs to get its head around very quickly: fitness signals and visibility.
Fitness signals and visibility: the two ideas that actually matter
Let’s make this simple.
Why do you choose Restaurant A over Restaurant B?
Because Restaurant A gives you better reasons to choose it.
Maybe the food is better. Maybe the service is better. Maybe the menu fits your tastes. Maybe it is better value. Maybe there is a signature dish you love. Maybe the atmosphere is exactly what you want.
Those are fitness signals.
They are the attributes that make a brand, business or product more likely to be selected.
Now add visibility.
Those fitness signals only matter if the market can encounter them.
If nobody knows the food is brilliant, the menu is distinctive or the service is excellent, the restaurant remains invisible. Goodness on its own is not enough. It has to be seen, talked about, experienced, mentioned, reviewed, demonstrated and remembered.
That is visibility.
And once you put those two concepts together, the future of so-called search becomes much easier to understand.
Brands will increasingly win not because they have gamed a keyword better, but because they have made their strongest fitness signals more visible across the network.
J.K. Rowling, Molly-Mae and the very old truth behind “brand visibility”
None of this is actually new.
That is the irony.
The term is newish. The reality is ancient.
Take J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter did not explode because the internet found the best keyword strategy. It exploded because a product got into the hands of the right early audience, those readers loved it, talked about it, passed it on, and the network amplified the signal. Visibility compounded because the product had fitness.
Same with Molly-Mae. Her fame did not emerge from some tidy, linear funnel. It came from network adjacency, media hubs, social exposure, audience transfer and repeated visibility. The network made her bigger because she became attached to bigger nodes and then built her own.
The same thing happens in business constantly.
When you start a small business, you do not begin with “topical authority”. You begin by telling people you exist. You network. You post. You attend events. You join groups. You ask for referrals. You showcase work. You create encounters. You get seen. You become known for something. That is growth in its rawest form.
So let’s not pretend brand visibility is some trendy semantic trick.
It is just a better description of how growth actually works.
Meaningful encounters beat meaningless content
This is the phrase I keep coming back to: meaningful encounters.
Contextually relevant encounters with the brand, for humans and for machines, are what matter now.
Not just more content. Better encounters.
That could mean: a review, a case study, a creator recommendation, a press mention, a comparison page, a podcast appearance, a useful Reddit discussion, a brilliant product page, a distinctive video, an industry list, a social post that travels, a founder’s perspective that gets shared, a customer story that gets repeated.
Those are encounters.
And the good ones do two jobs at once. They help people understand the brand, and they create more evidence in the wider digital environment that the brand exists, matters and solves a particular problem well.
That is a much more sophisticated and much more useful brief than “write four blog posts”.
What agencies should sell now
This is where it gets messy.
Because the biggest challenge now is not spotting the shift. The biggest challenge is productising it.
It was easy to sell four blogs and five links a month. It was tidy. It was measurable. It fit a retainer model.
“Make us more visible and more likely to be recommended” is a much better objective, but it is a harder product to package.
Still, that is where agencies have to go.
The future agency is not really an SEO agency. It is a visibility agency.
That means a broader mix of capabilities: positioning, messaging, copywriting, technical optimisation, digital PR, social media marketing, creator strategy, content marketing, review generation, third-party presence, design, video, brand-led reporting.
And yes, technical SEO will remain part of this. Crawlability still matters. Internal linking still matters. Product pages still matter. Structured information still matters in the right contexts. Links still matter too, because links remain a proxy for external recognition and digital fame.
But those things are becoming components, not the category.
The category is visibility.
How visibility should be measured
This is where a lot of people panic, because they think the new model is too fluffy.
It doesn’t have to be.
Measure reach. Measure impressions. Measure share of search. Measure brand search growth. Measure relevant rankings where they still matter. Measure recommendation presence for broad commercial prompts. Measure links acquired. Measure media mentions. Measure creator coverage. Measure referral traffic. Measure direct traffic. Measure branded demand. Measure engagement with the assets that actually travel.
Once traffic stops being the target, it becomes useful again as a diagnostic measure rather than a vanity KPI.
Same with rankings.
Same with links.
They are not the whole story anymore, but they still tell you something.
Why Semrush has probably named the future
This is why I think Semrush has done something strategically smart here.
Andrew Warden explicitly framed the activation around a serious point: in the AI era, brand visibility is everyone’s job, and it depends on the consistency of signals across multiple functions and platforms.
That is miles better than pretending this is all still just old-school SEO with a fresh acronym stuck on top.
And if SEMrush really leans into this, it could help drag the industry in a better direction.
Because the phrase is accessible. It makes intuitive sense. Clients understand it. CMOs understand it. Founders understand it. Boards understand it. “We need to make the brand more visible in the places buyers and machines look” is infinitely more comprehensible than the jargon soup the industry has spent the last two years vomiting onto LinkedIn.
That matters.
Categories shape budgets. Language shapes demand.
And “brand visibility” is a category that actually reflects the commercial problem people are trying to solve.
Bury SEO or keep pretending
So here is my conclusion.
SEO, as a label, probably needs to die.
Not the skills. Not the technical work. Not the craft of improving websites and helping search systems understand them. Those things will remain useful.
But the category itself has become too narrow, too compromised and too tied to a decaying delivery model.
The future is not rankings. The future is not citations. The future is recommendation.
And recommendation is earned through visible fitness.
That means stronger positioning. Better signals. More meaningful encounters. More evidence across the network. More fame in the right places. More commercial visibility.
So yes, Nicola Ponce, Andrew Warden and the Semrush team might have delivered the best April Fools activation of the week.
But the best part of it was not the joke.
It was the fact that the joke told the truth.
The only question now is whether the SEO industry has the courage to admit it.
Because this thing is moving, with or without them.
And as for me, I’m done debating whether “brand visibility” is the right direction.
I’m all in.
Andrew Holland
Originally published on LinkedIn on 3 April 2026.