80/20 Digital Founder, Colm MacGowan, recently presented a keynote at the Mortgage & Finance Association of Australia (MFAA) Conference, exploring how AI is changing lead generation for mortgage brokers. In this article, he shares the biggest insights from the keynote and panel discussion, and explains why trust, brand and operational excellence have become the foundations of being recommended by AI.
AI SEO is not a completely new disciplne. It is the next evolution of SEO, built on technical clarity, useful content, authority, reviews, citations and brand trust. AI platforms like Chat GPT, Claude and Gemini need clear, consistent proof of who you help, what you do best, when you operate and why you can be trusted.
A New Era of Advertising: OpenAI’s launch of the ChatGPT Ads Manager introduces a highly anticipated conversational ad channel, moving beyond traditional search, social, and professional networks. Familiar Campaign Architecture: The platform’s backend structure perfectly mirrors legacy networks with a standard hierarchy of Campaigns, Ad Groups, and Ad Creatives, making it easy for veteran media buyers to navigate.
AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude and Google Gemini are fundamentally changing how customers discover and evaluate businesses online. Search is shifting from keyword matching to trust evaluation, authority recognition and recommendation-based discovery. More than 60% of searches now result in no click, as users increasingly get answers directly inside AI-generated search experiences.
AI platforms like Claude, ChatGPT and Google Gemini are rapidly becoming the first step in the customer journey. Buyers are no longer searching using simple keywords. They are having detailed conversations with AI to qualify providers before visiting websites. More than 60% of searches now result in no click, as users increasingly get answers directly from AI-driven search experiences.
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) focuses on helping AI search platforms understand, verify and surface content as direct answers to user questions. AI search engines such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Perplexity prioritise clear, structured and trustworthy information over traditional ranking signals alone. Content performs better in AI search when answers are stated clearly, written in plain language and
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