May 4, 2026
Stepney Supper #4 brought five experts to the table to talk about how businesses get found in a world where Google isn’t the only front door. Here’s what stuck with us, and what your business should be doing about it.
Stepney Supper #4 sat five panellists at the table to unpack how discovery actually works now. Justina Gardiner hosted. Celia Harding from LEOPRD, Terri Williams from Studio Sondar, Simon Morelli from The Online Director, Sam Phillips from ODDR, and Luke Heffernan from The Australian Institute for Machine Learning brought the answers. The conversation moved fast across PR, brand, paid, and authenticity. The honest takeaway? The rules of being found have changed.
Celia Harding made the point that stuck with the room: language models trust third-party mentions of your brand far more than they trust your own website. If you want to show up in an AI answer, you need other people writing about you, talking about you, and citing you. Earned media is doing the heavy lifting now. A polished homepage on its own won’t get you mentioned in a ChatGPT response.
Simon Morelli was direct on this. When campaigns underperform, people blame the algorithm. Usually it’s doing exactly what it was told to do. It’s optimising against the brief, the audience signal, and the creative you fed it. Garbage in, garbage out, faster than ever. The fix isn’t a new platform. The fix is better inputs: a sharper brief, a clearer audience, and creative that actually says something.
Sam Phillips closed the loop on authenticity. As AI-generated content floods every feed, the answer isn’t AI detecting AI. It’s proving what’s real at the moment of creation. Provenance, verification, and the ability to point to a real person behind the work will matter more, not less. For brands, that means leaning into the things AI cannot fake: actual people, actual proof, actual perspective.
Search 2.0: How to stop being invisible online. The panel covered how businesses get discovered across both Google and AI platforms like ChatGPT, what’s changed, and what brands can do about it.
Justina Gardiner from Lightspeed Consulting hosted. Panellists were Celia Harding (LEOPRD), Terri Williams (Studio Sondar), Simon Morelli (The Online Director), Sam Phillips (ODDR), and Luke Heffernan (AMIL)
Stepney Supper #5 is on Friday 12 June at Stepney Studios in Kent Town. The theme is iPhone vs Professional Video. Tickets are limited.
