In the last few years, “SEO awards” have mostly been a branding exercise.
A press release, a badge, a backlink.

But in 2026, even small announcements like this one feel… different.

Nicely Network was recently mentioned in Better Business Advice’s AI-SEO campaign awards — and the interesting part isn’t the trophy.

It’s what the trophy represents.

Because AI-SEO is not just “SEO with ChatGPT.”
It’s not even “ranking in Google.”

It’s the emerging discipline of being selected, cited, and repeated inside AI discovery systems.

Rankings Are Becoming Less Measurable

Between AI Overviews, personalization, multi-model answers, and contextual rewriting, the old idea of “position #1” is fading.

What matters now is:

• whether an AI engine recognizes your entity

• whether your content is trusted enough to quote

• whether your brand appears across communities, not just SERPs

Search is turning into a selection layer, not a list.

The New Standard: Citability + Community Signals

One detail worth noting: campaigns that perform well today are rarely “pure SEO.”

They often combine:

• authoritative placements

• consistent entity framing

• engagement in organic communities (Reddit especially)

• repeated mentions across the open web

Because AI models don’t just rank pages.
They synthesize reputations.

Reddit threads, editorial references, and knowledge-graph consistency are becoming part of the same visibility equation.

Optimization Isn’t Just for Google Anymore

The real shift is simple:

SEO used to mean “how do I rank?”

Now it increasingly means:

how do I become the answer that keeps showing up?

That’s AI-Visibility.

That’s citability.

That’s long-term recommendation memory.

Closing Thought

Awards don’t matter.

But the ecosystem that produces them does.

And the ecosystem is moving from rankings…
to selection systems.

Source: https://www.martechcube.com/nicely-network-named-for-impactful-ai-seo-campaigns-by-better-business-advice/