Tom Vaughton, Andy Mollison
About
Tom Vaughton is the founder and CEO of Varn, an award-winning search marketing and SEO consultancy known for solving complex digital visibility challenges for ambitious brands. With over 25 years of experience in SEO, Tom leads a multidisciplinary team of technical SEO and GEO experts, data analysts, developers, and strategists, including Varn’s dedicated Innovation Team, which is pioneering new approaches to AI, agentic search, and brand visibility.
At the forefront of search evolution, Tom and the Varn team work with clients across healthcare, publishing, e-commerce, and B2B sectors to help them stay ahead in a world where AI is reshaping how information is found and trusted online. Varn has developed frameworks to audit and improve brand visibility across both traditional and AI-powered search engines.
As a regular speaker at industry-leading events, such as DME Lisbon 2026, BrightonSEO, and the NEXT Pharma Summit, Tom is known for sharing practical strategies that empower marketers to take action and drive measurable results for their brands and businesses.
Tom is a committed advocate for sustainable leadership, community engagement, and creating a people-first workplace culture. Varn’s woodland office in the UK reflects his belief in fostering environments that inspire creative thinking, support innovation, and promote team well-being.
With over 15 years of SEO and digital marketing experience, Andy Mollison is an SEO expert. He has shared his expertise on the main stage at BrightonSEO, the world’s largest SEO conference, and has worked in-house, agency-side, and as someone who has built and sold his own SEO businesses.
One of Andy’s biggest strengths is SEO strategy, in particular, helping to explain decisions in straightforward language so that even non-SEO professionals can understand what needs to happen and why in order to see success.
Outside of SEO, Andy is a fierce competitor on the race track and is also a professional motorsport instructor.
Tom Vaughton, Andy Mollison | The agentic optimisation workshop: How to build an agent-ready brand and marketing strategy
1. Abstract
The agentic optimisation workshop: How to build an agent-ready brand and marketing strategy. As AI agents like ChatGPT begin to search and purchase on behalf of users, you need to ensure your brand is ‘Agent-Ready’. This involves building high-trust signals and technical structures that allow autonomous systems to verify, cite, and recommend your brand as the place to buy a product or make a booking. If your website and digital footprint is not structured for agents, you will be missing out on the opportunity to be the default recommendation in an ecosystem where the human click is no longer the primary step taken to a purchase or a booking. In this practical, hands-on workshop, Andy Mollison will guide you through the technical and strategic requirements of agentic search optimisation. Moving well beyond standard keywords and basic AI summaries, this session delivers a deep dive into the backend of the modern web, ensuring agents can not only navigate your site, but also book or buy. Attendees will learn how to prepare their digital estates so that automated systems can seamlessly navigate, interpret, and execute transactions. You will leave this session not just with ideas, but with a practical checklist and the specific tools needed to future-proof your brand’s visibility for the new world of
agents.
2. Agenda
9.00 - 9.20 -Arrival, Intros + icebreaker
9.20-10.55- The fundamentals and measurement
- How do Agentic Crawlers/AI Search work? - How does AI understand content? - How does an AI agent "use" a website? - "Zero Click" - "Visibility" in Agentic Search
10.55-11.20 - Break
11.20-13.00 - How does an AI find (and "rank") information on demand? - Importance of Sentiment - Importance of Citations - Technical Basics - Query Fan Out
13.00-14.00 -Lunch
14.00-15.30 - Optimising Content for AI - Optimising for entities, not keywords (what is an entity?) - Finding Content Gaps - Content Optimisation for AI - Schema Markup
15.30-15.55 -Break
15.55-16.30 - Technical Setup for Agentic Crawlers
- Introduction to WebMCP and UCP - How do AI agents "shop" on a website? - How do AI agents "make a booking" on a website? - Testing your own websites and next steps.
3.Objectives
Objectives are that those attending will leave with a strong understanding of:
● How autonomous AI crawlers and agents navigate the web to execute
tasks rather than just retrieve information
● How to establish the authoritative trust signals required to ensure your
brand is verified and recommended by autonomous systems
● How to transition digital strategies from keyword targeting to entity-based
content architecture that feeds machine logic
● How to audit a current website using a structured framework to eliminate
friction points for automated AI transactions
● How to align backend site structures with emerging protocols such as
webMCP and UCP to allow software agents to make bookings or purchases
directly
4. Target audience and Prerequisites
If you have responsibility for reaching your target audience with your digital marketing efforts, then this workshop is designed for you. It is tailored specifically for content managers, e-commerce directors, and marketing leaders who need to maintain visibility as search behaviors shift. Attendees should have a baseline understanding of digital marketing principles . no advanced developer or coding knowledge is required to participate fully in the practical exercises.