BrainZ Digital wins AI search award as AI-first SEO goes mainstream
BrainZ Digital’s AI SEO win was judged on revenue, execution and AI breadth, not novelty, signaling the category is now buyer-safe.
BrainZ Digital’s latest award says as much about the market as it does about the agency: AI-first SEO is no longer a side experiment, but a sellable, judgeable discipline. The London-based firm won Best Use of AI at the UK Digital Excellence Awards 2026, a category that rewarded commercial performance, campaign execution and the breadth of AI integration across search work, not just flashy automation.
The same awards cycle shows how quickly that shift is spreading. Entries closed on 12 February, judging took place on 4 March, the shortlist landed on 6 March and the ceremony followed on 23 April. BrainZ Digital and Hulken were also finalists in Standout B2C SEO Campaign of the Year, while First Internet and Mulmar won the B2B SEO Campaign of the Year for AI Answers to Local Enquiries. Taken together, those results show AI-informed search work has moved from novelty into mainstream competitive territory.
BrainZ built its case around a Hulken campaign that was measured in hard search outcomes. The brand started with 98 non-branded keywords against 3,035 branded keywords, a sign of how dependent visibility had been on name recognition. In the earlier case-study framing, BrainZ said Hulken began with 92% branded search visibility, 78 top-10 keywords, 32,200 Google Search impressions and 25 sessions per month from large language model platforms. The agency said the target was 400 top-10 keywords and 200,000 impressions, and that it surpassed those goals.
What the judges appear to have rewarded is the way BrainZ tied AI into the whole search stack. The agency says it works across campaign strategy, content production, keyword research and GEO, aiming to help brands appear in large language model answers and AI-powered search results as well as in traditional rankings. BrainZ says it measures success in revenue rather than rankings, and that it tracks AI Overviews and LLM visibility in real time with proprietary tools. It has also built an AI auditing and tracking platform, an AIO Re Ranker Tool and an internal content machine powered by custom GPTs.
That toolkit helps explain why a 12-person remote agency spread across the UK and Europe is landing attention alongside larger competitors. BrainZ, founded in 2019 and headquartered in London, lists clients including Elementor, Yotpo, Melio, Hulken, Papaya Global, Mindspace and Carify. CEO Liraz Postan, formerly SEO and Content Director at Outbrain, has been using the award run to reinforce a wider message: AI should amplify human strategy, not replace it. With keynote stages at Drapers’ Hall, a pending slot at SEO Croatia Summit and a nomination at the UK Culture Awards for Best Agency to Work For, BrainZ is turning AI search from internal efficiency into external credibility.
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