Looking back now, a lot of the marketing behaviours that modern AI search is rewarding were already hard baked into the way the brand operates. And not because it’s trendy, but because it was authentic. Anyone who knows the HECK team will know that they have always led authentically from the heart first and foremost each and every day.
There is so much chatter about AEO, GEO, LLMs and AI searches, and a lot of it is led by snake-oil salesmen trying to sell you SEO, but more expensively.
The reality is, that AI search tools don’t just look at websites anymore, they look for corroboration. So, if your website says you are an expert, or even if you are ‘the UK’s favourite sausage maker’, AI wants to know:
AI is gathering evidence, and its sharing opinion based on the evidence it finds on forums, on sites like Reddit and in comments on social media to give you the best advice – just like your friends would do.
And this is exactly why HECK’s long-standing marketing approach is suddenly so relevant in the age of AEO.
HECK built their brand in the early days on working the shows circuit – getting their product into the hands (and the mouths) of visitors to food shows across the UK. At one point they were doing over 300 shows in a year… that’s a lot of shows!
But they have also been strong at brand building through PR and social media led campaigns along with strong community engagement.
This turned into retail activation as they took on the supermarkets – first in a small sample group of south-east Sainsbury’s store, backed up by in-person sampling in as many stores they could get to during that crucial first 6 weeks trial the supermarkets give to trialling new products.
PR stunts like delivering hot breakfast baps simultaneously to all radio stations during the morning shows also grabbed attention that then turned into real-world storytelling.
The brand built conversation first.
Our role over the years has been to ensure those stories didn’t just live fleetingly on social media or in the press cycle. So, we reflected the IRL HECK brand and reinforced messaging on the website itself.
This meant creating SEO-led landing pages, making sure that customers knew exactly where to find HECK in physical stores. It meant optimising campaign content – reinforcing and adding a deeper layer of information for people to discover when they read about a HECK campaign in a broadsheet, on TV or radio, of as part of an event.
Product content needed structuring properly and a focus was put on ensuring Google search audiences could discover these stories too.
At the time, this was simply good integrated marketing, but today it looks remarkably like so-called ‘AEO best-practice’.
One of the clearest examples of this in practice was the launch of the HECK! Lucky Bride’s Sausage in 2024.
The campaign tapped into an old wedding superstition that burying a sausage the night before a wedding would ensure sunshine on the big day.
This wasn’t a made-up story. The tradition already existed but it wasn’t a tradition that was widely known about.
After launching a special limited-edition product, gaining PR coverage, creating social conversation and getting good audience participation, this campaign gained good traction. But importantly, the website also carried supporting content and product pages around the campaign.
This ensured that the narrative existed consistently across offline media channels, social media and owned web content.
Very quickly AI systems and search engines alike began to recognise HECK in connection with the tradition itself. In effect, the internet collectively reinforced this association and before long, Google AI mode declared this tradition as being one that was ‘traditionally’ a HECK sausage burial, rather than sausages in general.
AEO is not about gaming the AI systems, it’s about consistently showing up and putting out the information on as many channels as you are able, and have that digital content backed up by offline sources.
AI systems are asking, “Does the wider web agree with what this brand is saying about itself?”
This is why disconnected marketing struggles, most especially if you like to chase ‘shiny objects’ without making sure your foundations are firm.
If PR says one thing, social says another and the website says nothing at all, the signal weakens. When messaging aligns across all channel, AI gains confidence and this then shows why integrated marketing suddenly matters more than ever.
One of the biggest misconceptions around AI search is that SEO no longer matters, when in reality the opposite is true.
What’s fascinating about the rise of AEO is that many of the “new” best practices aren’t actually new at all. The technical and content foundations built through years of SEO work are now feeding AI systems too, which we talk about in more depth in another blog on our website – GEO vs. SEO: Why SEO is Still the Foundation of AI Search Visibility.
They’re simply good marketing fundamentals.
The brands that have spent years building genuine recognition across multiple channels are now in a much stronger position than those trying to reverse-engineer AI visibility overnight.
HECK is a brilliant example of that.
Not because it chased AI trends.
But because it spent years building a connected brand ecosystem that AI can now easily recognise, validate and trust.
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