Sun, sea and Search. This April, the Uprise Up team returned to Brighton for three days of brain-buzzing talks from industry experts. Lots of insights to apply to the charity sector…
AI still dominated the conversations at BrightonSEO this year, but the tone felt more evolutionary than revolutionary.
Dr. Pete Meyers’ keynote captured this sentiment. Rather than framing LLMs as a clean break from traditional search, he positioned them as the latest step in a much longer journey, one that Google has been on for years. Advances in vector embedding (the technical system behind how LLMs work), and Google’s growing ability to understand intent, have laid the groundwork for this moment well before the recent surge in AI interest. While platforms like OpenAI have quickly captured market share, Google’s depth of experience in this space gives it a significant and often understated advantage. This sparked internal conversations around the ‘LLM wars’, particularly the uncertainty around monetisation and whether AI-led platforms can sustain a profitable model.
Across both Organic and Paid sessions, a consistent theme emerged around the changing shape of the modern marketer. AI is not reducing the need for expertise, it’s increasing it. To get the most out of these tools, marketers need to become more T-shaped than ever, combining deep specialism with a strong understanding of tracking, content and technical SEO, UX/CRO, and creative strategy. This is a direction we’ve been heading in since the beginning of the year; we’re finding that the more connected these disciplines are, the more effectively AI can be leveraged.
For me, a personal highlight was also attending Jason King’s session on maximising Google Ad Grants. It was encouraging to see representation from the charity sector, and we were especially pleased for Uprise Up to receive a shoutout from Jason.
What follows in this blog are some of the standout insights from across the team, covering the sessions that sparked ideas, challenged assumptions, and will shape how we approach our work in the months ahead.
– Will Rhodes (Media Director)
Highlights from Rachel (SEO Analyst)
Google is increasingly considering your entire site, not just individual pages.
As Amanda Walls discussed, Google is no longer simply ranking individual pages; it’s ranking entire sites and brands that it trusts. This is particularly true in Your Money or Your Life (YMYL*) niches, which charities often occupy, because when the stakes are high, Google prioritises sources it can trust.
This means charities need to be thinking about how they can showcase their experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) beyond merely the page they’re publishing. Google now pays more attention to your social media output and mentions on forums like Reddit.
This also means strong editorial standards are more impactful than ever. By creating expert hubs, providing transparent logs of when content was created and last updated, disclosing methodologies, and having clear policy pages, even small charities can establish themselves as authoritative entities.
* YMYL refers to content that could impact users’ health, finances, safety or wellbeing.
Misinformation is worse than ever, but charities can take advantage of strategies to fight back.
From LLMs that hallucinate data to fearmongering on social media, health charities face a constant battle against misinformation. And the problem’s more pressing than ever, because as NHS waitlists remain at record highs, many people are relying more on AI for their information. But AI search platforms infer from patterns, not truth, and their condensed, pieced together summaries aren’t built for nuance.
In his talk on Fighting Misinformation, Sean Barber advised on how YMYL organisations can fight this.
Health charities should provide expert-reviewed content that’s regularly updated and shows a last-updated date, so search engines and users alike know how fresh and relevant the content is. Encouraging staff to establish a public presence, such as on-site author biographies, or even by appearing in video content across various platforms, is also a proven way of building trust.
Charities should also be transparent about their processes – that includes their content production, authorship, and medical review process. They should get involved in PR opportunities that spread public awareness, which again helps establish the brand as a trusted resource.
It’s also important to create content that addresses misinformation head-on, whether that’s myth-busting blog articles and social media content, or top tips for finding reliable health information.
Actively avoiding AI-like sentence structure can improve your ranking.
How is it that we can just tell when something was written by a human versus when it was not? And what is it about human-written content that makes it feel more trustworthy? In her talk on Subverting AI Copywriting Frameworks, Emily Hill dissected some of the tell-tale signs of AI copywriting.
The structure of content is the first thing that both search engines and readers see, and one of the primary giveaways of AI-generated content is sentence structure. LLMs almost always use similar syntactic templates and sentence clauses, which make copy feel predictable.
If every piece of content uses the same template, nobody stands out, so understanding and avoiding these structures will help charities differentiate their written content from everyone else’s.
80% of top-ranking content is still human-written, so both Google and readers significantly prefer authenticity.
By understanding what it is about AI-generated writing that makes readers ‘turn off’, we can flip the switch and make sure our content has that human touch.
Highlights from Holly (Paid Digital Media Assistant)
Paid Search and SEO should inform each other.
A useful reminder from Everest Nwagwu’s talk on Integrating Paid Search & SEO, was how closely the two channels can and should work together. In particular, the idea of using high-performing PPC data to inform organic strategy stood out – such as taking top CTR headlines from Paid Search and using them to shape H1s and on-page messaging.
Another effective approach is to review top-performing PPC keywords alongside Google Search Console data, to identify high-intent terms that should be prioritised across both SEO and Paid campaigns. This reinforces the importance of not treating channels in isolation, but instead building a T-shaped understanding of performance and intent.
For Paid Social creative, variations should be distinct and bold.
Aggie Meroni’s talk on Paid Social Creative Strategy explored the importance of being bold in an attention-driven landscape. Rather than relying on small iterative changes, the emphasis should be on testing more distinct creative variations and learning from performance data. Seeing real case studies where unexpected creative performed best was particularly insightful.
Charities and digital marketers alike should take advantage of platforms like Reddit for research to identify popular themes that can inform this creative. Uncovering genuine customer pain points and motivations can be translated into stronger messaging and more effective creative testing.
Highlights from Scott (Paid Media Analyst)
Charities should plan for their ads to appear in AI Search.
Ashley Fletcher’s talk on Google AI Overviews highlighted how quickly AI-led results are moving into more search queries, with no sign of slowing down.
AI ad penetration still appears lower in healthcare than other industries, which may give some charities more breathing room. However, this is unlikely to stay static. The key takeaway is that charities should start preparing for their ads to appear in AI Overviews (which still generate significantly more ads than ChatGPT) and have a plan of action for when they start appearing, informed by the latest developments in AI SEO.
Streamlining account structure can help make the most of a limited Meta budget.
Vicki Jakes highlighted how Meta accounts with limited monthly budgets (or even with budgets as high as 10K/month) benefit from simple account structures, even when that means having only one campaign. This matches our own experience: by not splitting out campaigns, you increase the amount of data flowing through each, increasing the chance of successful machine learning and optimisation.
The biggest opportunity for charities is creative testing and being bold. Creatives are now essentially becoming a targeting signal, so it’s increasingly important for creative to be extremely diverse. No two creatives should look similar, especially when first starting a campaign, so it becomes clear what works and what doesn’t. Separating video and static ads into different ad sets can also make performance easier to understand.
A set-up that consists of a single campaign with 3-5 ad sets, and 3-6 creatives per ad set, will often outperform a more granular account structure. Streamlining account structure also leaves more time for projects like creative design and landing page optimisation – which goes back to the importance of considering content, SEO and Paid Media under one cohesive T-shaped strategy.
Highlights from Leila (Digital Media Assistant)
You can use AI training data to spot content gap opportunities.
Genie Jones explored how to understand what AI knows about your charity by analysing entity* gaps. This means using training data to see the disparity between what entities AI search platforms are using to categorise your organisation, versus the entities you would like to be present in, to pinpoint where LLM knowledge may be lacking.
When conducting content gap analysis, you can utilise hallucinations to form a history of where AI has learned about your charity and assess any content gaps where hallucinated URLs do not exist.
* Entities refer to the real-world concepts that AI systems use to understand, rather than using exact keywords; they could be topics, people, places, brands etc.
Smaller Google Ads accounts should avoid segmentation.
On the Paid side, Heather Robinson spoke about How to Optimise Google Ads When You Don’t Have Enough Data, focusing on smaller and low-budget accounts that don’t have a huge amount of traffic every month. As she explained, it’s important to preserve your signals by reducing fragmentation, because fewer campaigns = faster learning.
Furthermore, it’s more important than ever to ensure landing pages are well-optimised for conversions and intent, and avoiding broad match keywords where unnecessary, to maximise the value achieved by lower monthly spend Google Ads account.
AI SEO strategy needs to include these three key metrics…
In his talk on Entity SEO, Topical Authority and Information Gain in the Age of AI Searches, Felipe Bazon spoke about the ‘modern SEO triad’. This includes entity, topical authority and information gain as the new influences in SEO, marking a shift away from the traditional keywords and backlinks. Charities can help search engines and LLMs understand their organisation as a whole by providing a depth and breadth of content across your key topics, and making sure that content is original and novel.
We left Brighton SEO April 2026 feeling full of fish, chips and tantalising insights. In the coming months we’ll explore and test the strategies we learned about, and keep all our clients updated with the latest technical developments.
If you’d like to know more about how we can support your charity’s digital marketing strategies, send an email to hello@upriseup.co.uk or drop us a message via the contact page.
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