Brad Wetherall: AI Search, Agentic AI, and How Corporations Must Adapt to Digital Discovery

Search is no longer just a destination. It is becoming an intelligent decision layer.

In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VanderLinden speaks with Brad Wetherall, former Google executive, about one of the biggest shifts facing CEOs, CMOs and growth leaders today: the move from traditional SEO to AI-mediated discovery and generative engine optimisation.

Brad spent more than a decade at Google working across platforms including Google Business Profile, Google Shopping, Google Wallet and Google Domains. He brings an insider view on a critical question: when AI becomes the first interface between customers and your brand, will your organisation still be visible, credible and chosen?

For years, businesses competed for search ranking. Win the top result and you won attention. But AI search is changing the rules. Customers now receive AI-generated summaries, recommendations and direct answers without always clicking through to a website. In a zero-click world, the real contest is shifting from page position to machine-readable authority.

Brad explains why this matters now. AI overviews, conversational search and agent-led discovery are compressing the customer journey. At the same time, the rise of AI-generated content has made the web noisier, more crowded and harder for algorithms to interpret with confidence.

In this new environment, your brand is shaped not only by what you publish, but by what AI systems infer, assemble and say about you.

The episode explores why E-E-A-T — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness — is now essential for AI search visibility. These are no longer just content quality principles. They are strategic trust signals that influence whether AI systems surface your brand, cite your expertise or leave you out of the answer entirely.

For corporates, especially in insurance, financial services, legal and other regulated sectors, digital discovery can no longer sit only inside marketing. It must become a board-level capability linked to trust, governance, reputation and competitive resilience.

For startups and scaleups, durable visibility now requires more than clever growth tactics. It requires credible positioning, structured content, ecosystem validation, local presence, reputation signals and proof that AI systems can understand who you are, what you do and why you matter.

For marketers and digital teams, the work is evolving from traffic generation to intelligent orchestration across SEO, GEO, brand authority, structured data and AI-readable content.

Sabine also connects AI search to the wider Frontier Firm shift: a world where intelligence is available on demand, humans collaborate with AI agents and professionals enter the Agent Boss era. In this future, customers may not search directly. Their AI agents may search, compare, filter and recommend providers before a human ever visits a website.

That changes everything.