Earning Accurate Coverage is Part of Trust-Building Now
You get cited for what others say about you as much as for what you say as a brand. Answer engines lean on the same authority signals but draw from a narrower set of sources they already trust. “I’d resist treating AEO as an independently dialable lever: citation frequency is now a lagging consequence of authority,” says Jason Huan, CMO at Endowus.
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AI makes content and creative execution easier; the harder question is what makes a brand distinctive enough to be noticed and trusted.
AI has made it easier for brands to produce more content, but that does not mean there is more room for everyone to be seen. Search and answer engines still have a limited number of places to surface information.
What increasingly matters is what makes a brand worth choosing and citing. Proprietary data, a defensible point of view, primary sourcing and institutional expertise are becoming more valuable as customers encounter more information before they ever reach a brand’s website.
The pressure is not limited to visibility. Marketers are also being asked to show how investment is contributing to business outcomes, while answer engines are influencing discovery before a customer reaches a brand’s website.
For Jason Huan, Chief Marketing Officer at Endowus, a Singapore-based digital wealth platform, these changes are reshaping how brands think about visibility, trust and growth. Jason discusses why answer engine optimisation is increasingly tied to authority, how AI is changing the balance between creativity and commercial accountability, and what newer brands need to do to build trust.
Full interview;
AI is making it much easier to produce content at scale. But when everyone can create more content, does having more of it actually make it harder for a brand to stand out?
Yes, though not because of the volume itself. Search and answer engines are selection systems, not storage systems. Supply multiplies, the number of slots doesn’t, and the bar rises as a result. AI hasn’t made it harder to publish; it’s made churning volume worth less, and being chosen worth more.
What’s scarce is what was always scarce: proprietary data, a defensible point of view, primary sourcing, and real institutional expertise. Look at what actually gets cited in AI answers in any regulated category, and the pattern holds; regulators, primary sources, a small set of publishers people already trust. The winners are unlikely to be the highest-volume producers.
There is a greater focus on ROI from marketing spend. How can other marketers best convey priorities to stakeholders and demonstrate impact?
Most of these conversations go wrong because three claims get conflated: contribution, attribution, and causality. Stakeholders are usually asking about the third, and are answered on the second.
Two things help. Agree on the measurement standard before the campaign, not after; retrospective metric selection is how credibility gets spent. And make the prioritisation framework visible: explicit weights, explicit tiers, explicit decline criteria. It turns arguments about taste into arguments about criteria.
For long-cycle work, be honest about the lag rather than manufacturing a monthly number. Authority compounds; reporting on it in four-week intervals measures your reporting cadence, not the work.
How have answer engines changed the way customers discover your products? What can SEO teams do to make the shift to AEO impact?
Evaluation now happens before the visit. Someone forms a view on whether you’re credible, what you charge and who you’re for inside a synthesised answer they never click out of. By the time they arrive, the shortlist is made.
The mechanical change is smaller than people assume. Answer engines lean on the same authority signals, drawing from a narrower set of sources they already trust. So, I’d resist treating AEO as an independently dialable lever: citation frequency is now a lagging consequence of authority.
Practically, shift the unit of optimisation from the page to the claim; can a model state a correct, attributable fact about you consistently, everywhere that fact appears. Earn third-party corroboration, because you get cited for what others say about you as much as for what you say.
You’ve spoken about the challenge of balancing creativity with commercial accountability. How has AI further changed the dynamic here?
The old tension was resource-shaped. Creative work was expensive and slow, so every idea had to survive a business case before anyone saw it. That gatekeeping was frustrating, but it forced conviction – you only fought for the idea you believed in.
AI removed the expense, not the problem of conviction. Concepts can be visualised before they’re sold in; a campaign idea can be seen rather than described, and a route that would have died in a deck now gets shown. That’s real gain: the argument moves from “trust me” to “look at this”.
But cheap execution changes what an idea has to be to win. When you can make anything, what wins is what’s easiest to justify, and easy-to-justify creatives are usually the safe, legible, performance-shaped kind. The bold idea used to lose because it was expensive to try. Now, it loses because the modest one has a cleaner number attached. That’s the worst reason.
The other shift is what creative directors are actually for. If producing the work is no longer the scarce input, the value is entirely in the decision; the taste to pick, kill and hold a line under commercial pressure. That’s harder to defend in a budget conversation than a team of people making things, and I think organisations will under-invest in it for a while before they realise what they lost.
And the thing nobody’s priced yet: distinctiveness is a diminishing asset when everyone draws from the same well. If every brand in a category uses the same tools and references, the work converges.
Commercial accountability will eventually have to account for that, because sameness is a cost even when each individual asset performs.
How can newer brands earn trust when consumers, especially in the fintech space, where reputation is key?
Nobody has ever been persuaded into trusting a financial institution by an ad campaign.
Trust here is built on things that can be fact-checked: licensing, fee mechanics stated plainly, disclosure that doesn’t need a magnifying glass, and consistency in how you behave when markets are unpleasant. Communicating during drawdowns does more for credibility than any brand work.
For newer brands specifically: say what you don’t do. Transparency in that respect reads as honesty, and overclaiming is the fastest way to lose a sophisticated audience.
And accept that the most influential surfaces aren’t yours: review sites, forums, comparison platforms, and the AI summary assembling them all. Earning accurate coverage is part of trust-building now, among other things.
