Why Your Brand is Now Crucial for SEO in 2025

As PRs, we’ve always known the value of brand. But the SEO community? Not so much.

At brightonSEO last year, an SEO said to me “link building is for search, PR is for brand”. And at one time that might’ve been true. But not anymore.

Recent Google leaks have outlined what every digital PR already knew – you need a strong, established online brand to perform well in search. Here’s why:

• Google values brand because it’s difficult to fake your way to a strong, established brand, so it’s a great measure of trustworthiness.
• Recent Google leaks revealed the metrics that Google employs to measure brand strength, including brand mentions, brand interactions and branded search.
• Test it for yourself by reviewing the branded search for your top-ranking competitors in search. Most of them will be well-known, well-searched brands.
• Brand is also key for visibility in AI search, alongside having semantically similar text to the original search (although AI is changing every day).
• The main takeaway? You need to invest in your brand to succeed in SEO in 2025.

Google’s focus on brand skyrocketed when AI hit the mainstream. Suddenly, anyone could create thousands of blogs in minutes, fast-tracking their content marketing and driving huge amounts of traffic. This flooded Google with (crap) regurgitated AI-content – massively reducing the quality of the search results.

So Google needed a fix. And as usual, this came in the shape of algorithm updates. It released a stream of updates that prioritised helpful, people-first content and E-E-A-T. But the sites who won the updates shared something else: they had strong brands.

Big players like Forbes and Fortune are perfect examples of this. They were rewarded with unbelievable (undeserved) search visibility, and they took advantage – creating massively profitable affiliate networks that covered every topic under the sun (e.g. “CBD gummies”). These networks have thankfully now been hit, but the point remained. Google still values well-known brands.

May 2024 Google leaks

So what evidence shows that search engines (namely Google) actually use brand signals in ranking? We’ve got the recent Google leaks to thank for that.

When the Google API documents were leaked last year, the SEO community collectively lost their minds. The leaks uncovered some huge insights – many that SEOs had been believing for years, and many that were a complete surprise. But one finding really stood out to us: Google’s ability to identify and measure brand entities.

Indeed, it was such a core finding that Rand Fishkin highlighted it as his main takeaway from the leaks as a whole:

“If there was one universal piece of advice I had for marketers seeking to broadly improve their organic search rankings and traffic, it would be: Build a notable, popular, well-recognized brand in your space, outside of Google search.”

As a digital PR agency, we’ve always believed in the value of brand – and we’ve used it to deliver great results for our clients (such as employee benefits client, Rippl). But many SEOs have long disputed the importance of brand for search. So it was brilliant to see it evidenced so clearly in the leaks.

Brand = site_quality (December 2024 study)

And that’s not all. In December, Mark Williams-Cook shared the results of a Google exploit at SearchNorwich that further backed this up. The talk was full of incredible insights (watch the whole video below), but to us, the brand-related findings stole the show.

Williams-Cook revealed that Google measures brand strength through something called a ‘site_quality’ score. How? According to him, your site_quality score is influenced by metrics like:

• Branded searches (how often people search for your brand name)
• Interactions with your brand (like clicks when you’re not ranking in the top positions)
• Brand mentions and anchor text around the web (wider brand visibility, not just links)

Check the talk out below. It’s 100% worth a watch. But the long and short of it is this: to succeed in SEO in 2025, you now need a well-known, well-searched brand.

Here’s a test for you. How often do you see a spammy website ranking at the top of the SERPs? For me, it’s almost never. Gone are the days of a dodgy site cheating its way to the top (unless you’re counting some questionable Reddit threads). Today, the top-ranking sites are typically established, trustworthy brands – dovetailing perfectly with what Mark Williams-Cook and others have found.

Have a test for yourself. Google your business’s target non-branded keywords and note down who’s ranking in the top positions. Then fire up your SEO tool of choice (for us it’s SEMrush, but any should do). Use it to work out the branded search volumes for each of these top-ranking brands (here’s how to find branded search in SEMrush if you need a hand).

Now analyse the data. We’d wager that most of the top-ranking websites will have relatively high levels of branded search. Yes, there might be a few lesser-known regional businesses served up by Google’s localised search. But the majority of top-ranking sites will be well-known, well-searched brands.

So brand is key for visibility in Google. But is it important for AI search? The short answer is yes. It really is.

Recent studies have found that LLMs look for semantically similar results that have been shared across authoritative places online. So when you ask an LLM to recommend a brand/business, they look for:

• established brands,
• with consistent messaging,
• across multiple offsite, authoritative channels.

In other words, their focus on brands is similar to Google. Which is great news for us as digital PRs. Our work can directly influence brand visibility in LLMs.

However, it’s important to remember that AI search is very, very new. And it’s developing at such a rapid rate that what works today might not tomorrow. We’ll be exploring this as a wider topic in the near future – so keep an eye out for future blogs.

It’s simple. You need to invest in your brand. Traditional SEO is still essential, but brand building should be integrated into every marketer’s strategy. Find out where your audience are spending their time, who they’re engaging with, and what’s influencing their decision making. Then get your brand in front of them.

If you want to grow your search presence in 2025, you need to build a strong online brand entity.

Need help achieving this? Our digital PR experts can help. Get in touch at susannah@energypr.co.uk.