Hacking AI Search vs Building Brands: What's Actually Working | Soaring Above Search #1

I spent this week at the Phuket AI Marketing Summit, 3-5 April 2026.

Dozens of talks, good energy, heads were down in their Claude terminals.

A trend I noticed was presenters showing more experiments and tests than I've seen in SEO presentations before. My theory is that with AI, everyone's got more capability to analyse data sets and draw conclusions. The barrier to entry for "data-driven SEO" dropped to near zero. Which means the data itself is no longer the differentiator. The interpretation and the business outcome are.

Can You Really Hack AI Search?

Yes. Absolutely. And people are doing it right now.

Black hats are doing genuinely wild things to manipulate LLMs.

LLM outputs can be influenced through strategic content placement, entity manipulation, and prompt-aware writing.

It has the same energy as early SEO. Wild west, fast-moving, no rules yet.

How long until the platforms patch these gaps out? No idea.

They get closed, new loopholes open, and the cycle repeats.

Is Humanity Over? What Will "Work" Look Like in 2-3 Years?

I ended up on a panel about AI and the Future, and quickly it delved into the unknown.

What happens to work? What happens to agencies built on execution work that AI can now do in minutes? What will humanity look like?

My take: smart people will find new pathways.

People who are cruising will have a harder battle. The acceleration is real, even in the last two weeks.

That's why I encourage everyone I talk to, regardless of their role, to stop just using AI to write emails. Get building. Learn how to prompt properly. Build your own workflows. Understand how these tools actually work under the hood.

The people who are actively building with AI right now will be years ahead of those who waited. And "years ahead" in this environment might mean the difference between thriving and scrambling.

Things are moving faster than most people in the industry realise, and there's actual fatigue of having to keep up with the pace.

That makes me ponder: will it snap back into people not caring, like how we get tired of that same actor we see in movies, or the same artist releasing music?

Building a Real Brand with Real Traffic

The answer to the gap kept coming back to the same place: brand.

Build something real, get real traffic from multiple sources, be present where your audience actually spends time.

I've seen this on our own websites.

The things that actually moved the needle weren't clever hacks.

They were structural: internal linking, category restructure, cluster expansion. The kind of work that compounds quietly over weeks and months.

Outside of that, we've been doing heavy content marketing through our own podcast, YouTube channel, Meta ads, the works. I've seen the firsthand impact of AI search on our business through the $100K+ of revenue it's created in the last 6 months, and expect it to increase over the next years.

Even a day before I left, someone came through asking me to speak at a conference about AI Search. They found me through Claude and Copilot.

Never expected that, and now it's a new norm.

What I'm Testing in SEO This Week

Microsoft Clarity MCP

Connects Microsoft Clarity's behavioural analytics directly to Claude via the Model Context Protocol.

Scroll depth, dead clicks, rage clicks, engagement time, all queryable in natural language.

How to use it: Install the @microsoft/clarity-mcp-server package, add your Clarity API token, and configure it in your MCP settings. Then ask Claude things like "What's the scroll depth for /my-page/ in the last 3 days?"

That combination told me on a page that the content was fine (users engage when they arrive) but the title tag and meta description were the problem.

Without the behavioural layer, I would have rewritten the content instead of the metadata. Clarity MCP turns a guess into a diagnosis, and it's totally free. Very underrated. Test it out.

Video of the Week

Harry Sanders walks through what he'd actually do if he were learning SEO from scratch in 2026:

This Week's Takeaway

You can manipulate LLMs. You can also build a brand that doesn't need to. The conference made it clear: both paths work right now. For me, only one of them compounds for the long term.

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