TORONTO, March 04, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Justin Cook, President at 9thCO, will speak at the EvolveDigital Summit in Toronto on Friday, March 6, where he will present insights on how brands can achieve visibility in the rapidly evolving landscape of AI-powered search.
The EvolveDigital Summit brings together developers, marketers, strategists, and designers to explore emerging trends in digital strategy, artificial intelligence, accessibility, and open-source technologies.
Cook’s session, “Achieving Brand Visibility in the Era of AI Search,” explores how conversational AI systems such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity are reshaping how users discover information online. As traditional search journeys shift toward AI-generated answers, brands must rethink how they build authority and ensure their content is surfaced within AI-generated responses.
“Many marketers are asking how to ‘optimize for LLMs,’ but that framing misrepresents how these systems actually work,” says Cook. “Large language models themselves don’t browse the live web. Instead, AI assistants rely on retrieval systems that identify trusted content sources and feed them into models to generate answers.” (9thco.com)
Cook will explain how modern AI search systems use Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures that combine search indexes and retrieval mechanisms with language models to synthesize responses.
His talk will introduce the four pillars of retrieval visibility, a framework for understanding how brands can appear in AI-generated answers:
- Eligibility: Ensuring content is technically accessible and discoverable by retrieval systems
- Authority: Building trusted signals through credible sources and citations
- Compressibility: Structuring content so AI systems can easily extract and summarize key information
- Association: Creating clear connections between brands, topics, and entities
“As AI becomes a primary interface for discovery, visibility will depend less on traditional rankings and more on whether your brand is recognized as a trusted source within the ecosystem of retrieval systems,” Cook added.
Cook’s session will focus on practical strategies for marketers and digital teams to adapt their content, architecture, and authority signals to remain discoverable as AI reshapes the customer journey.
Event Details
EvolveDigital Summit
Friday, March 6, 2026
MaRS Discovery District
Toronto, Canada
More information about the event can be found at: https://www.evolvedigital.com/
About 9thCO
Founded in 2013, 9thCO is a Toronto-based digital strategy and technology agency specializing in technical SEO, headless commerce, and digital transformation. The company helps organizations build high-performance digital platforms and adapt their marketing strategies to emerging technologies such as AI-powered search.
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