Francesca Belmer almost talked herself out of giving this WTSTalk.

She’s not a day-to-day SEO practitioner.

And somewhere between saying yes to the session and building her slides, that started to feel like a problem.

Francesca’s role is Senior Manager of Product Marketing at Yext,

So instead of trying to sound broader or more “SEO enough”, she leaned into what she actually does best: taking a pile of insights and turning them into a story that means something.

That became the story of the whole session: when we worry that what we are good at is not enough, we often try to sound like we can do everything. Brands do it too.

Francesca has spent around 15 years in product marketing and describes herself as an increasingly enthusiastic data nerd.

She also joined us at WTSFest Portland 2026, which she described as one of the most non-judgemental, welcoming conferences she had attended - remembering that experience was one of the things that helped convince her not to back out of this talk.

And we’re so glad she didn’t!

Check out a summary below of what you can expect to learn in the recording.

• Watch on YouTube
• Check out the deck

When we don’t feel like enough, we try to sound bigger - people & brands

Francesca connected a very human feeling of not being enough with something brands often fall into as well: broadening their claim. The hope is we will then become visible for all of the things!

This can sound like:

• Full-service
• End-to-end
• We do it all!

But what Francesca actually found in the data: our strength is in being specific.

You control more of AI visibility than you might think

91% of AI citations come from sources a brand can directly control or manage.

~47% came from brand’s websites, another 44% came from listings like third-party directories where brands manage their profiles.

But AI is not simply taking your homepage at face value.

Francesca explained that it cross-checks what you say about yourself against reviews, listings, social sources and the rest of the information it finds online.

If your website makes a claim and the rest of the internet repeatedly says something different, that is a weak signal.

People are fact-checking AI too

95% of consumers surveyed said they verify an AI recommendation before acting.

With this, she shows us that reviews are the conversion layer between being mentioned by AI and being trusted enough for someone to act.

Specific questions reward specific pages

The clearest example came from research across 10 businesses and around 1,800 locations.

The brand stayed the same. The website stayed the same. What changed was the specificity of the question.

For a broad question like “Where can I ship a package?”, the general location page received 61% of citations and the dedicated service page 27%.

Change to a specific question to “Where can I get something notarised?” and the result flips: the dedicated service page received 86% of citations.

The takeaway is not that a brand can only specialise in one thing.

It’s that each thing you genuinely specialise in should have somewhere specific to live.

Find the expertise your customers are already telling you about

If you are not sure what you should become more specific about, Francesca gave us a practical place to start: read your reviews.

• What do customers repeatedly say you are great at?
• Which service keeps getting mentioned?
• What particular thing seems to delight people?

Even 5 minutes looking quickly through ~50 reviews.

You’ll find a repeated strength, then turn it into a page or piece of content that makes that expertise easier for AI, and future customers, to recognise.

AI will find your page and verify it with the reviews that helped you build that page.

Try Francesca’s 1-sentence exercise

Francesca asked everyone to complete one sentence:

“We are the people you call when…”

1 answer. Not 25 services squeezed onto the end.

Her own personal version:

“I’m the person you call when you need to turn a pile of insights into a story that hopefully resonates.”

The WTS chat filled up with answers like “We are the people you call when you need to:”

• capture revenue from search
• untangle your marketing metrics
• turn ideas into reality
• have a space where people can ask questions without being judged
  (busted! this was our answer for WTS)

What should you actually prioritise?

During the Q&A, Francesca gave a helpful step-by-step:

1. Start with the structured data layer to make sure your important business facts are machine-readable.
2. Distribute your facts accurately and consistently across your website, local pages, service or intent pages, and listings.
3. Focus on specific service pages that capture high-intent needs.

If you genuinely specialise in 3+ things, you do not need to choose one.

Give each one a page instead of asking a single generic page to explain everything.

The thing you actually do is enough

Francesca almost talked herself out of this session by imagining what a “SEO speaker” was supposed to sound like.

But the whole point of the talk is that AI (and people) aren’t typically looking for “everything expertise.”

More often, they need something specific enough to understand and validate.

As Francesca put it, that is what gets you “cited, verified, trusted, chosen.”