Hugues Bantigny, co-founder, quoted in OtterlyAI

"What should brands do to win on AI Search in 2026?"

That’s the question Rick Tousseyn, GEO Content Strategist, recently asked our co-founder Hugues Bantigny for OtterlyAI’s roundup "How Top Brands Are Winning on AI Search? Industry Experts Share Tips for 2026", which gathers the views of 33 practitioners. NewsCore’s contribution appears in the section "We Are Entering the Context Search Era".

Hugues’ reply

Since the beginning of the open web, being visible as a brand has always been about getting associated with the right keywords. AI-powered search is changing this paradigm. Today, it’s about plugging yourself to one or multiple customer contexts. We are entering the "context search" era. Search becomes intelligent. What matters is being contextually relevant.

And it’s great news! We are finally turning the web into what it should be: a proper representation of how people and businesses interact with each other in real life. We don’t shoot out keywords at each other’s faces. We identify pain points, deduce needs, and design use cases. We look to align our offers and messages with the multiple contexts of our audiences.

AI search is actually much more logical than traditional SEO; winning it is just about understanding your customer base, and aiming to address the right-few instead of the wrong-many. Think about what they want (e.g. what is their search context) and how they benchmark it (e.g. which questions they ask to sort multiple offers and fine-tune their need). You will then identify areas where your brand relevancy should focus on.

Why context search matters for marketing and communication teams

As OtterlyAI’s article points out, AI search engines no longer return a list of links: they return a single answer. For a brand, the question is no longer only "which keywords do we rank for?" but "in which customer situations are we the relevant answer?". Answering it requires knowing those situations precisely, and that is a monitoring question before it is a content question.

In practice, a context search strategy rests on three inputs:

1. The contexts of your audiences: the problems they describe, in their own words, in the press, on social networks and in communities. A structured social media monitoring process is the most direct way to collect them.
2. The questions they use to compare offers: the criteria buyers discuss when they benchmark solutions, which consumer intelligence helps to map.
3. The way your brand is described elsewhere: AI answers are built from what the web says about you, which makes online reputation monitoring part of your visibility strategy.

How NewsCore helps

This is the very logic behind NewsCore. Our AI-native platform replaces boolean keyword queries with natural language queries and contextual search that vectorises the semantic field of a request, natively multilingual. Each agent continuously scans its sources, filters the noise, checks credibility and extracts the key information. For marketing and communication teams, it means a continuous, reliable view of the contexts in which their audiences talk, compare and decide.

Context is what brands need to understand to win on AI search. It is also what NewsCore is built to capture.

Sources

• OtterlyAI, How Top Brands Are Winning on AI Search? Industry Experts Share Tips for 2026 (2026)