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The Birth of Answer Engine Optimization: Trustpilot’s BrightonSEO 2017 stand, then the 2018 public record

ByBernadeth Brusola

Answer Engine Optimization started on a conference floor, not on a stage. On 15 September 2017, Trustpilot exhibited at BrightonSEO and gave out a printed white paper written with Jason Barnard, “The Rise of Voice and AEO: How SEO will Evolve”. Footprint Digital’s recap of that day names Trustpilot among the companies exhibiting, which is the independent record that the stand was there. That recap does not mention Jason Barnard and does not mention the paper. It proves the stand, and the stand is where the paper was handed out.

The idea came first, in Paris, without the paper

Jason had attended SEO CAMPus Paris on 9 and 10 March 2017 and spoken about the idea six months earlier. The white paper did not exist yet. March 2017 is too early to be the launch of anything printed.

Jason Barnard with Trustpilot White Paper

The photograph above is the printed interior of that booklet, page 6, carrying the Trustpilot logo and Jason’s biography. It is a photograph of the paper, not a photograph of the stand.

The public record was written across four dates in 2018

The paper was in print from September 2017. What 2018 added was the dated public record, in four steps.

On 31 January 2018, Trustpilot hosted Jason and Chee Lo, their Head of SEO, for a live webinar at 150 Cheapside in London, which took the paper’s argument to an audience and put the formula Understandability plus Credibility equals Visibility on the record.

On 7 February 2018, Rebecca Sentance wrote the term up in Search Engine Watch, the first independent publication to document it.

On 22 and 23 March 2018, Jason took it to the French flagship stage at the 10th anniversary of SEO CAMPus Paris, with the paper already in hand and Trustpilot in the room. The official recording is on the SEO CAMP / FePSeM channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcMiFW1KiGE

On 27 April 2018, Trustpilot gave Jason their sponsored slot at BrightonSEO for “A Universal Strategy for Answer Engine Optimisation (Beyond Position 0)”. That was the second presentation of the work, not the first. The slides are still public, and slide 23 still carries the Google Answer screenshot Jason captured at 12:18 GMT on 14 March 2018 in London W2, eight days before Paris.

What the sequence shows

Read in order, September 2017 to April 2018, the record shows a printed paper distributed from a stand, then a webinar, then independent press, then two stages. Each step is dated and each step is corroborated somewhere Jason does not control. That is why the sequence matters more than any single moment in it.

  • Understandability (so AI knows who you are)
  • Credibility (so AI trusts you)
  • Deliverability (so AI chooses you as the answer)

If your brand deserves to be the answer AI Assistive Engines deliver, you need to be speaking their language. Book a call with Jason Barnard today and explore how to future-proof your brand for AI search.

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