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The year is officially in motion, and Flow Agency is already booking flights, creating guides, watching the future of AI Search take shape, and showing up where the industry actually gathers. From conference stages to new research to a few strategic “keep your eyes on this” moments, here’s what’s already lighting up our start to the year. Let’s get into it. ✨ Thank you for creating this newsletter, Angela Ash. And special shoutout to Ben Trigueiro inside!

Every session built around one thing: what actually works right now. How did Canva scale to unicorn status through product-led SEO? What does a PPC campaign built for real ROI actually look like? And how do you take an e-commerce brand from zero to $1M? You'll hear it directly from the people who've done it. And leave knowing exactly what to do next. May 14, 2026 | Guoco Midtown Network Hub, Singapore Want to go deeper? Block May 13. Limited pre-event workshop passes are open to main ticket holders only. USD$32 per session. Pre-event workshop topics coming soon. Watch this space. Secure your spot: ahrefsevolve.com/singapore

We have worked on a new series: SEO for LLMs. We cover SEO for ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude and Perplexity. Pretending that we published the ultimate guide / practical tips would be wild. I don't think that as an industry, we fully understand these systems and how to optimize for them. But Sofie Couwenbergh's thoughtful guides do something different: - They contextualize - They explain investor relationships and media partnerships - They show how these systems are the same - and where they are radically different - They provide clarity I'll pop the one on Gemini SEO into the comments for you! Why Gemini? Because it is everywhere now - Chrome, workspace, used itself. 2026 is the year for Gemini to shine. Curious... what do you like about the new series? How could it be better? Be bold and let me know!

OpenAI’s announcement about ChatGPT Ads got everyone’s attention. Anthropic saw its chance, and used nothing less than the Super Bowl to target its rival and reassure users that Claude will remain ad-free. Whichever side you’re on, LLM advertising has arrived. B2B brands need to fight the war for attention on an increasingly large battlefield. One brings new opportunities to generate visibility, and new challenges as well. The brilliant Sofie Couwenbergh created this new piece for Flow Agency and summarized the LLM ad possibilities (and difficulties) to help you navigate introduction of this new marketing channel. Let's make sure you don’t miss the trend that could define 2026. Or if you miss it - let that be a choice - not a lack of information.

Curious... what are you measuring these days? Search is diversifying and ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude take over all kinds of tasks - including the tasks related to research, vendor comparisons and making shortlists for tech buying decisions. Tools like Peec AI, Profound, Ahrefs or Semrush give new insights into our LLM performance: - What is the share of voice / visibility score? - How often is a brand cited? (With a link) - How often is a brand mentioned? (As a name in the suggestions) But there are a few issues with it: 1. Visibility doesn't tell the whole story. The whole story lies in your CRM where you measure down-funnel events and how many people turn into MQLs and SQLs. The problem: Many people that found your brand via an LLM or AI Search are attributed to Direct or Branded, Organic Traffic in your CRM. If you do not have a way to capture self-reported attribution (in your forms or your discovery calls), you might judge LLMs based on the referral traffic they provide - not the powerful tool they have become for vendor research. 2. AI visibility tools measure the prompts that your marketing team entered for tracking - not (necessarily) the questions your prospects and customers are asking. Meaning: Just because we can measure the visibility of hundreds of prompts (usually provided by AI as suggestions) doesn't make it meaningful data. The best questions to track are coming from your customers and prospects, your sales team and your customer success team. Do you have a way to capture their knowledge and turn it into a measuring framework for prompts? 3. AI visibility tools tell you where you stand - but not how to fix or improve visibility. LLM visibility is highly volatile (new post coming soon), so tracking visibility is only useful if you have a process to ➡️ identify easy, low-hanging fruit fixes now and ➡️ build a strategy for long-term for sustainable growth beyond hacks and exploiting loopholes. Meaning: Yes, we have the data now. But you still need your marketing team to turn this data into insights, strategy and tasks. Below is a screenshot for how I am currently thinking about LLM success: From input metrics, to progress (visibility) to impact (meaningful conversions). What is yours?

🔎 Looking for a new role this year? We may be looking for YOU! 🔍 We’re hiring a Director of Client Services who understands that real flow doesn’t come from constant urgency or endless status updates. It comes from clarity, trust, and teams that know when they’re doing their best work. At Flow Agency, client service is where strategy meets momentum. You’ll shape how work flows across teams and clients, helping senior specialists do their best work, while delivering meaningful results for B2B tech and SaaS brands. This is a leadership role for someone who enjoys guiding experts, not micromanaging them, and who believes calm is a competitive advantage. This role is for you if: 🔹 You lead autonomous teams with confidence 🔹You can speak SEO, GEO, paid media, and performance without drowning in jargon 🔹You know how to turn client challenges into steady wins 🔹You work comfortably across time zones and cultures 🔹You care about building flow, not just hitting deadlines 🌏 We’re remote-first, globally distributed, and intentionally low-drama. No ping-pong tables. Just smart people, focused work, and space to think. Plus, we come together for an in-person team retreat every year... including laughs, collaboration, and all the good vibes included. 👉 Learn more and apply here: https://lnkd.in/gnxsr8VQ Or, if you know someone who’s brilliant, curious, and allergic to boring work, send them our way! 🦄

SEO isn’t just about rankings anymore. It’s about whether AI understands your brand. In our latest video, Viola Eva and Helene Jelenc break down why brand marketing now sits at the center of AI search and SEO, and how misaligned websites, profiles, and reviews can quietly hurt your visibility in Google, AI Overviews, and LLMs. 🎥 Watch the full video here: https://lnkd.in/dP8p4Qhj

You may have gained visibility in LLMs only to realize that what AI says about your brand is outdated, incomplete, or plainly wrong. Examples include: Old pricing information, outdated product descriptions and wrong messaging. Look, in many ways LLM answers are merely the average of everything that has ever been said about your brand online. And that includes your library of COVID-related content, a Reddit thread where your customer complained about the price increase in 2018, a listicle article created by your competitor, the Youtube channel a past team member created 4 years ago with a password now missing, or the review site(s) that you are not actively managing. The good news: A lot of these LLM sources are in your control - others are harder but not impossible to update, align and expand on. Here is how we think about it: Top down from web properties that you own and control to those the hardest to influence... ⬇️ 1. Audit the content on your own website. Prune old and outdated topics. Refresh those topics that are still relevant today. Make your point of view not the lonely theme that lives on a pillar page - make it the cohesive approach that permeates all content old and new. 2. Review your social media profiles and update them to the current logo, company boiler plate and tagline. Yes, that includes LinkedIn, Youtube, Facebook etc. But also factor in Crunchbase, Google My Business, Glassdoor and other directories. 3. Integrations, partners and marketplaces. If they still use your brand colors from 2019, now is the time to get in contact with their teams. Make sure that their integration pages have your latest boiler plate, product description and feature list. 4. Update your review site listings. Same boiler plate as for socials. Making sure you are listed in the correct category. Collect fresh reviews that talk about the latest features, e.g. your AI rollout 6 months ago. 5. Ask for corrections on listicles that you are already featured in - this is especially true if you are a category leader and competitors and content sites naturally include your brand in their "best software" listicles. If they have wrong or outdated information, you can always ask for an update. 6. And then, you will want to build an approach to for digital PR, media appearances, inclusions in more listicles or meaningful participation in forums. Most people start at the bottom, the hard stuff, the unlikely stuff (listicles, Reddit, Wikipedia...). I recommend to start at the top: With the web properties that you own. Tell a cohesive story. Update and align your digital footprint before you expand.

Referral traffic from LLMs has been a rollercoaster. First explosive growth in 2024: +527%. Then: The last year ended with +9% (January 2025 vs 2026) for our 20 B2B SaaS benchmarked. Reasons include: - Zero click searches for most LLM questions and prompts. People simply do not see a reason to click through and go to your website. - The link that made you be mentioned in LLMs might be from your website - or it might be from a review site, listicle or media article (and they get the click). - People are interested and go to your website. But they are attributed to Direct or Branded Search - and unless you have self-reported attribution, they will not show as influenced by LLMs. - Seasonality, e.g. over the summer or during the Christmas holidays. - LLM models used and how likely they are to include outgoing links. - Relative importance of sources for LLMs e.g. we seen moments where links from Reddit, Wikipedia or LinkedIn have been favored over individual websites. So, LLM referral traffic IS a meaningful metric. But it doesn't tell the full story. That is why you want to pair it with tracking your visibility in LLMs. Metrics like: - What is the share of voice / visibility score? - How often is a brand cited? (With a link) - How often is a brand mentioned? (As a name in the suggestions) When you start measuring this performance, you will want to add competitors (point solutions as well as software suites, category leaders as well as challenger brands) and compare your visibility against theirs. Only then will you know if a 70% likelihood of being mentioned is a reason to celebrate - or a reason to cry.

In July 2025, Anthropic’s Claude captured 32% of enterprise LLM usage market share, ahead of OpenAI (25%). Monthly visits to Claude on desktop and mobile web combined grew by more than 64% between April and September 2025, up to 157 million. Then Claude Cowork took the world by a storm in early 2026. And now, they had the funniest advertising during the Super Bowl. So, if you have not thought about Claude yet... now is the time to study Sofie Couwenbergh's guide and understand the nuances: What the products entail and how you leverage Claude for marketing and visibility. Check it out!

New video: LLM SEO: How to Gain Visibility in LLMs (ChatGPT & More) Helene Jelenc, Sandra Potisek and I had a lot of fun recording this one. I hope that you will enjoy it, too - and will learn something along the way. We covered: ➡️ How LLMs fit into the Search ecosystem ➡️ What you can (and can’t) measure today ➡️ Technical foundations for LLM SEO ➡️ Traffic quality from AI tools vs. Google ➡️ Schema markup and LLM optimization (the honest take) ➡️ Listicles, Reddit and user-generated content ➡️ Brand reputation in the age of LLMs And... what still works from “classic” SEO. 🔥 Check it out ⬇️ and let me know what you think!

🤖 Gemini isn’t “just another AI tool.” It’s quietly becoming the operating system of Google Search. 🔍 In her latest Flow blog article, Sofie Couwenbergh breaks down what SEO for Gemini actually means, and why B2B brands can’t afford to treat it like a side project. Gemini now powers AI Overviews, AI Mode, query fan-out, Chrome integrations, and the Gemini interface itself. Translation: visibility isn’t just about ranking blue links anymore. It’s about showing up across AI-driven moments — often without getting the click. 🔗 Here’s what that shift creates: 💎 Impressions rise while clicks shrink 💎 Keyword-first strategies start to crack 💎 Topical authority becomes the real moat If SEO feeds your growth engine in 2026, this one deserves real focus time. 👇 Read the full article on the Flow blog and tell us: are you tracking Gemini visibility yet, or still flying blind? ✈️ https://lnkd.in/etPyBAyW

WE. ARE. BACK. TOMORROW LIVE! We’ve got ⭐️ Josep M Felip and ⭐️ Helene Jelenc for SEO Office Hours, alongside Jo Juliana Turnbull and Michael Chidzey, this Friday at 9:30 am (GMT). To join live, head over to our website to get the invites added to your calendar 📅. Everyone’s welcome ❤️ If you don't know Josep... Josep M Felip has been in the digital space since 2006, when he founded his first ecommerce store - Spain’s very first online wallpaper shop. His curiosity about how people discover things online sparked a passion for SEO, leading him to build a series of niche ecommerce sites and blogs before committing to SEO full time in 2009. Originally from near Barcelona, Josep is fluent in Catalan, Spanish, French, English, and conversational Italian. In 2014, he moved to Brighton, where he has continued to hone his craft - working across the travel industry, agency, and in-house roles before founding Amplfyr, a content optimisation app that helps your get more visibility in the new search landscape. Josep is a mentor, a speaker at conferences including BrightonSEO and Search Barcelona, and a judge for the UK, European, and Global Search Awards. If you don't know Helene... Helene is Director of SEO at Flow Agency, specializing in search marketing for B2B SaaS. From anthropology to SEO, Helene thrives in analysing complex data sets and digging into what makes us human. She's spoken at BrightonSEO, Croatia SEO Summit, SEO Estonia, and contributed to Search Engine Journal and Women in Tech SEO. When she's not analysing search patterns, she's exploring Europe's historic towns and food festivals. Learn more at Flow Agency. As always, Mike and Jo will be there too for some live problem-solving. Head over to the Good Signals website to add the invites to your calendar. You can also submit questions and watch previous episodes. #FindYourWay #SeoOfficeHours #SEO #SEOhelp #SEOadvice

Lately, I have been struggling to post with decisive commentary on the state of (AI) Search and B2B marketing. In meetings and calls, I have been telling my clients and prospects for months: We are in the Penguin - Panda - Hummingbird era of LLM visibility. It is a mental image that clicks for those long enough in marketing to have fully experienced these algorithm updates. High volatility, changing landscape, a great time to exploit loopholes if you are early - a brutal time if you are late and being punished. So, before chasing the next technical hack (Reddit, listicles, Wikipedia...), it’s time to take a breath… … and return to the fundamentals. In the age of generative answers, the fundamentals are no longer a chore - they are your true competitive edge. The juicy stuff. Brand.  Narrative.  Information gain. Design. Thought leadership. We use new names today. But it is the stuff that was good content marketing all along. All the reasons why I have been in love with content marketing for the last decade. Content marketing made my personal brand and grew the agency to 15 people. I just know so deeply what it is like when it is good. And what it can do for you. But on LinkedIn, I did not say it. I felt like the more I know, the less I knew how to say it. Writer’s block over the last 6 months or so. Lots of re-sharing posts, much less creating posts. Now, it is time for spring. It is time for creativity. So, I am promising you my creative comeback to the platform. Let’s do this!

2026 is a time of uncertainty: between rising cost-per-click, falling organic traffic, and the chaos of post-acquisition website and brand migrations, B2B content marketing has hit a wall of diminishing returns. Now, we are all rushing to optimize for LLMs and AI Search, but we’re missing a critical risk: If your content is indistinguishable from an LLM’s output, you have no real relationship with your audience. Even worse, you may have visibility only to realize that what AI says about your brand is outdated, incomplete, or plainly wrong. If you feel overwhelmed by the shifting landscape but "freaking out" isn't one of your KPIs, my talk at Ahrefs Evolve in Singapore is for you - and now is the time to grab your ticket! Before you chase the next technical hack, it’s time to take a breath and return to the fundamentals. In the age of generative answers, your fundamentals are no longer a chore—they are your true competitive edge. I will introduce Flow Agency's framework for the Branded Search and Digital Footprint Audit. (Shoutout to Boban Ilik and Helene Jelenc!) You will learn that LLM answers are merely the average of everything that has ever been said about your brand online. We will explore how to audit your current digital footprint and align your digital presence, so that the LLMs represent your brand accurately. You'll walk away with a complete framework, so you can start organizing your website, social profiles, review sites and commonly cited sources straight after the conference.

Ahrefs Evolve in Singapore: I'll be speaking about B2B content marketing for the future. Join the party! 💃 You will see the amazing Sasha Gusain, Dan Petrovic, Tim Soulo, Ted Chong, Muhammad Ilman Akbar, Xinyuan (Loki) Y., Robert L., Charlotte Ang, and James Norquay. And the food... oh, the food of Singapore. I can not believe that I have never been (outside the airport). This will be the most exciting culinary experience to happen to me in 2026. Thank you, Ahrefs, for inviting me and Kliment Stamenkov for joining the travels. Let's go, Singapore!

Finally, I see it said out loud: We are heading into the Penguin / Panda / Hummingbird era of many LLMs. Some optimizations currently receive an outsized advantage in LLM visibility. If it is too good to be true... it usually IS to good to be true. My bet on 2026 is volatility, a rollercoaster of visibility as well as hacks and over-optimizations receiving the first demotions. Oh, well...