Algorithmic Immunity and Building a Brand Built to Last
People often ask me a question, almost always with a sense of anxiety: “What should we be doing right now?” And “right now” means this quarter’s trend. First it was Facebook, then vertical video, then LinkedIn. Today it’s generative AI and optimization for response engines. The question keeps changing, but the unease remains the same.
My answer usually disappoints people. I say we should be doing what we should have been doing all along: clearly defining who we work for and what we’re good at, keeping our promises, and treating those who pay us well. And doing this long enough for the market to take notice.
It's the ABCs. And that's precisely the problem: it's so basic that it doesn't seem sophisticated enough to be taken seriously.
The thesis
A long-term brand doesn't protect itself from algorithms with tricks. It protects itself with fundamentals. And those fundamentals seem too simple to be taken seriously.
I call this “Algorithmic Immunity.” It’s the state in which a brand becomes unavoidable—in search engines and in artificial intelligence responses—because the system recognizes it as a benchmark. The algorithm doesn’t create authority. It reads authority that already exists in the real world.
If this is true—and my experience tells me it is—then much of the effort I see companies putting in is misdirected. They’re optimizing how they’re read, when they haven’t even written anything worth reading yet.
Why doesn't simplicity convince?
There are reasons why we resist the basics. The first is that the basics don’t sell. No one organizes a conference on meeting deadlines, nor are there courses on answering the phone politely. The market for ideas rewards novelty. And those who sell tools, training, and consulting services (and I include myself here) have every interest in making every year seem like a revolution.
The second reason is more human. The basics require patience, and patience doesn’t show results the very next month. A new tactic gives a sense of progress: we take action, we post, we measure, and there’s a graph that goes up. Even if it doesn’t lead anywhere, it’s comforting.
The third reason is that the basics lay us bare. If my company’s problem is that it lacks a TikTok strategy, the solution is easy to buy. But if the problem is mediocre service or vague positioning, the solution forces me to look inward. It’s more comfortable to blame the algorithm.
The Case of Personal Branding
An idea has taken hold as an absolute truth: business owners must produce content and build their personal brand. Those who don’t, they say, are leaving money on the table.
I disagree with the generalization, although I don't disagree with the practice.
I write, record videos, and speak publicly about my thoughts. I do this because I like to think out loud, because my work thrives on trust, and because, in the industries I’m involved in, the person and the proposal are closely linked. That doesn’t make personal branding a universal requirement. It’s a tool that, in my case, works well.
In my opinion, it depends on at least four things.
It depends on the type of business. At a consulting firm or an agency, people are the main selling point. With a consumer product brand, the customer wants to know about the product, and the founder’s face may be irrelevant or even distracting.
The brand must outlive its founder. If the goal is to build a company that will one day operate without us—or that can be sold—tying all authority to a single person creates a dependency. A personal brand can be an asset, but it can also be a single point of failure.
It depends on the profile and motivation of the person behind it. Content created out of obligation stands out. An owner who hates putting themselves out there—and only does so because they read somewhere that they had to—will generate noise rather than authority. There are those who serve the company better by taking care of operations, people, and customers. And that, too, is brand-building.
What’s there to say? Without a point of view of one’s own, without real-life examples, and without accumulated experience, the content will simply repeat what’s already out there. AI has made this even more evident: producing text is no longer difficult, but having something to say still is.
Therefore, the right question isn’t “Should I have a personal brand?” The right question is “Where should my business’s authority reside, and who is in the best position to build it?”
What, after all, is the ABCs?
At Jelly, we’ve never chased SEO trends. Since 2011, we’ve been creating content based on real work, and for 15 years we’ve been in the top 3 for digital marketing searches in Portugal. We’ve weathered Google updates, algorithm changes, and now AI. We haven’t discovered any tricks. Quite simply, what we did didn’t rely on any tricks at all.
When I break it down, I find five things, all of them simple:
- A clear positioning. A brand must be the obvious answer to a specific question. A brand that tries to answer everything answers nothing.
- Work that deserves to be mentioned. Authority comes from work, not from a website. Everything else is just hype.
- Promises kept and customers well taken care of. No tool measures this indicator, but the market picks up on it.
- Consistency. One entity, one message. What we say on our website, on social media, in proposals, and in meetings must all align.
- Time. Trust builds up like compound interest. There’s no shortcut to a decade you haven’t lived through.
None of this is new, and none of it provides a good overview of trends. But it all survives any algorithm change, because none of it depends on it.
To resist is also to change
It may seem contradictory to argue this on a blog about a framework for change. It isn't. Changing effectively doesn't mean changing all the time. It means knowing how to distinguish between what should change and what should stay the same.
Tools must change. Channels, formats, and techniques will continue to change, and it’s a good thing we adapt. But mindset comes first. A company that knows who it is, who it’s for, and why it deserves trust can experiment with as many trends as it wants, because none of them will lead it astray. A company that doesn’t know any of this will be swept away by them all.
Most of the brands I see fail in the long run didn't fail because they missed a trend. They failed because they forgot the basics while chasing after those trends.
An algorithm doesn't create authority. It reads it. Here's a simple question for you: if all algorithms changed tomorrow, what would become of your brand?
