Tuesday we pre-registered four predictions about whether a scored “narrative ownership” metric out-predicts Share of Voice at explaining which brand AI engines recommend. We coded 18 brands across 6 buyer-intent categories on the same frozen corpus — and three of four predictions held. Narrative ownership separates the pick from its runner-up (44% vs 35% vs…

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Monday we showed Share of Voice ranks the AI’s runner-up ahead of the winner: the consensus pick sits on fewer best-of lists (82.6% vs 93.2%), with a lower rating and fewer reviews, yet still gets recommended. The lever we named was “narrative ownership” — owning your category’s defining-attribute language in independent prose. But a slogan…

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The whole 2026 GEO tooling wave — Profound, AthenaHQ, Peec and a dozen others — is built on one metric: Share of Voice, your share of AI brand mentions. AthenaHQ’s State of AI Search 2026 pegs the average brand mention rate at 17.2%. But when we checked whether more Share of Voice actually predicts which…

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This week we asked which reputation signal separates an AI “consensus” pick from an equally-good runner-up, pre-registered four predictions, and scored 18 brands. The verdict: three of four predictions failed. Best-of breadth doesn’t separate the pick (runner-ups matched or beat it in 5 of 6 categories), star rating is a 4.2–4.5★ floor everyone clears, and…

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Tuesday we pre-registered four predictions about which reputation signal separates an AI “consensus” pick from an equally-good runner-up: best-of breadth, review rating/volume, and a breadth-gated moat. We scored 18 brands across 6 buyer-intent categories against those predictions — and three of the four failed. Breadth doesn’t separate the pick (runner-ups sat on as many or…

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Monday we proved the AI “consensus” pick is real (two engines’ shortlists overlapped in all 12 buyer-intent categories) but can’t be self-manufactured (self-citing vendors won 0 of 2). So which reputation signals actually separate a consensus pick from an equally-good runner-up? Here’s our full pre-registered method: we score three candidate signals — third-party best-of breadth,…

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The 2026 advice is that you become the AI “consensus” pick by piling up third-party mentions and reviews — 85% of brand mentions come from off-site sources, and review-rich brands get recommended more. Our first-party data confirms a consensus even exists: across 12 buyer-intent categories, two engines’ top recommendation sets overlapped 100% of the time…

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The advice says publish your own “best-of” listicle, rank yourself #1, and win the AI recommendation. Our week-long GEO Lab experiment says the self-ranking trap is real — and worse than advertised. A big vendor’s own listicle was cited in only 8.3% of 24 buyer-intent answers, the #1 recommended brand’s own site was the cited…

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We scored 24 buyer-intent answers from Gemini and Perplexity to test whether publishing your own “best-of” listicle and ranking yourself #1 wins the AI recommendation. It doesn’t — and it barely wins a citation. A major vendor’s own listicle was cited in just 8.3% of answers, the #1 recommended brand’s own site was the cited…

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