Kris Jones is right about awards. The industry was wrong.

Kris Jones went on the Search Engine Journal podcast this week and said something the SEO industry has quietly agreed to sneer at for about ten years. He said if you want AI systems to recommend your business, go apply for every credible third-party award in your industry. All of them. The pay-to-play ones. The ones with the same names in the winners' circle every year. The ones that feel a bit tacky.

He knows how that sounds. He said it anyway, because he's looked at what actually shows up in AI recommendations and worked backwards. His line was direct: *"Those are the companies that are showing up in the AI recommendations."*

He's right. And the reason the industry has been dismissive of awards for a decade tells you everything about why so many SEO strategies are misfiring on AI search right now.

The awards conversation was always about the wrong reader

For years, the case against industry awards was that Google didn't really count them for much. A backlink from a mid-tier awards site might carry some authority, but the juice usually wasn't worth the squeeze. You paid £2,000 for an entry, you got a badge for your footer, and your rankings didn't move. So the sophisticated SEO position became: skip the awards, invest in real link building, focus on content.

Awards content used to be judged. Now it's counted.

That analysis was fine when Google was the only reader you cared about. Google could tell the difference between a genuinely prestigious award and a mill. It weighted accordingly. The maths made sense.

But there's a new reader now, and the new reader isn't nearly as discerning.

Large language models don't grade sources the way Google does. They ingest text at scale, they weight by frequency and co-occurrence, and they build associations between entities and categories. If your brand name appears next to "top digital marketing agency" across forty different awards sites, forty industry roundups, and forty best-of comparison pages, the model learns that association. It doesn't audit the sources for you.

That's the shift. Awards content used to be judged. Now it's counted.

Synthesis was always going to reward volume of mention

The whole conversation Kris was having with Loren Baker centred on one word — synthesis. AI systems do the comparison work that users used to do themselves. They read a hundred sources, they synthesise, they hand back a recommendation. The user acts on that recommendation without ever opening a tab.

If you accept that framing — and you should, because it's what's actually happening — then the question becomes: what is the model synthesising *from*? And the answer is basically anything on the open web that talks about your category, arranged by co-occurrence and semantic proximity.

Awards content is one of the few formats where third parties reliably publish your brand name next to a category descriptor and a positive qualifier.

That's the whole thing. That's why it works. It's not that the awards are prestigious. It's that they produce structured, semantically clean, positive brand mentions at scale — and they produce them on sites the model has already learned to associate with the category.

Compare that to a typical "content marketing" piece. You write a 2,000-word guide on your blog. The model reads it. Fine. But the piece is on your own domain, it's a first-party source, and the model treats it accordingly — as your claim about yourself, not as a third-party signal about you. It's the difference between saying "I'm a great consultant" and having someone else say it. AI systems, like humans, weight those differently.

The Kris Jones position lands on top of my Brand is the Moat position

I've written that brand is the only compounding asset in AI search and that most page-level SEO work is running out of runway. Kris's awards point is a specific mechanic sitting inside that bigger argument.

Brand-building in the AI era means producing the widest possible surface of third-party mentions that associate your name with your category. Awards are one lever. Industry roundups are another. Being interviewed on podcasts (as Kris was) is another. Publishing on other people's platforms is another. Trade press coverage. Book contributions. Conference speaking that produces written recaps.

None of these are new tactics. What's new is that the payoff mechanic has changed. In the Google era, you did earned media because it produced backlinks and referral traffic. Both real, both measurable, both slow-compounding. In the AI era, you do earned media because it produces training data — or rather, retrieval data — that models draw on when someone asks a synthesis question.

The half-life is also different. A backlink from 2019 still passes authority to your site today. A brand mention from 2019 might still be in a model's training set, might not. But mentions from the last twelve months are the ones being pulled into RAG systems and cited in real-time. Recency matters more than it used to.

The uncomfortable part

Here's the bit the industry doesn't want to admit. A lot of what looks like grubby, pay-to-play, obviously-commercial content marketing is actually the most efficient AI discovery investment available to a small business right now.

The £2,000 industry award you were told to skip? That's probably a better AI search investment than a £2,000 content agency retainer producing thin blog posts. The "top 20 agencies in [your city]" listicle that felt cynical to appear on? That's now a source document a model uses to answer "who are the best agencies in [your city]." The trade publication roundup you ignored because the audience was small? The audience isn't the point anymore. The mention is.

I'm not saying all of it is worth doing. Some awards are genuinely worthless — the ones that don't rank in Google, don't have real editorial presence, don't get cited elsewhere. Those still don't matter. But the tier just below the actually-prestigious ones, the tier the sophisticated SEO advice told you to skip, is exactly the tier that's now producing outsized returns in AI discovery.

The uncomfortable truth is that the SEO industry's taste has been wrong for two years and nobody wants to say it.

We taught a generation of marketers to sneer at obvious visibility plays because they didn't move Google rankings. Now the visibility plays are the strategy, and the ranking-focused work is the thing that's running out of runway.

What this means if you're planning 2026 budget

If you're sitting with a 2026 marketing plan and trying to decide between another £30,000 of content production versus a mix of awards, industry roundups, podcast appearances, and trade press pitches — the mix is almost certainly the better bet. Not because content doesn't work, but because content on your own domain is being read as your claim about yourself, and the model already discounts that.

The work that's genuinely undervalued right now:

Getting a PR person or a publicist on retainer for six months to pitch trade press and industry lists. Applying for every award your business plausibly qualifies for, filtered by whether the awarding body has any real presence in Google's index. Making yourself available for podcasts in your category, including small ones — the transcript is what matters, not the download count. Submitting to be included in category roundups, comparison articles, and "best of" lists on established industry publications.

None of this is glamorous. Most of it will feel like a step backwards if you've spent the last five years building sophisticated content operations. But the ground has shifted, and Kris Jones is right to say so plainly.

The awards your competitors are quietly applying for are the awards the model is quietly counting. That's the loop. The industry's been too proud to see it.