Latest GEO & AEO guides
Practical playbooks to get your brand cited by AI search — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.
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AI Is Eating Product Discovery. Is “GEO for Products” Real — or Just a Feed You Can’t Rank In?
A wave of “GEO for products” advice is landing as shoppers move discovery into ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Here’s what actually changed — the OpenAI Product Feed, Agentic Commerce, ChatGPT Shopping — and the honest limit vendors skip: a clean feed makes you eligible, but it doesn’t buy you the pick. The lesson we’ve already…
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If AI Search Decoupled From Google Rank, Can We Measure the Gap Blind? Our Pre-Registered Protocol: 8 Buyer-Intent Queries, 3 Engines, and the Overlap Bands We Locked Before Collecting
Monday we argued that a #1 Google ranking no longer guarantees an AI citation — the top-rank-to-cited overlap fell from ~70% to under 20% — but that the collapse isn’t zero and isn’t uniform across engines. Today we turn that claim into a blind, pre-registered experiment. Two rival models compete: the rank-mirror model (AI answers…
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ChatGPT Just Shipped “Site Tools” (WebMCP) — Is This the New GEO?
On August 25, 2026, OpenAI added WebMCP “Site tools” to ChatGPT’s desktop browser, letting agents call a website’s own functions instead of guessing through its UI. It’s being framed as the next GEO. It isn’t — or not the way the hype says. WebMCP is the action layer (help an agent that already arrived get…
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The Verdict: The Narrative-Crown Model Graduates — But at 4/4, Not the Flattering 5/6. The Volume Leader Went 0-for-12, So We’re Retiring “Mention Rate” as a Vanity Metric
This week we asked whether “AI share of voice” is a real metric or a vanity number, and whether the only score that moves a buyer — the best-overall crown — can be called blind. Monday we argued mention rate is vanity. Tuesday we pre-registered 6 crown predictions and locked them. Thursday we scored 5…
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The Blind Crown Test Scored 5 of 6 — and the Volume Leader Won 0 of 12: In Every Category Where the Biggest Brand Isn’t the Narrative Owner, AI Crowned the Smaller Brand
On Tuesday we pre-registered 6 predictions and locked them before querying a single engine: in each category, we bet the “best-overall crown” would go to the narrative owner — the brand that owns the category’s defining sentence — not the volume leader with more installs or mentions. Today we ran the neutral query “best [category]…
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Does Ranking #1 on Google Still Get You Cited by AI? What the “70% → Under 20%” Data Actually Says
A widely-shared 5WPR/Brandlight finding says the overlap between top Google rankings and AI-cited sources collapsed from ~70% to under 20% — fueling a “SEO is dead for AI” narrative. Here’s what the data actually supports: the correlation really did collapse, but it didn’t hit zero, ~92% of AI Overviews still cite a top-10 domain, and…
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Cloudflare Blocks AI Crawlers by Default on Sept 15 — What It Actually Changes for GEO
On September 15, 2026, Cloudflare flips its AI-crawler defaults: Agent and Training bots get blocked on ad-serving pages for new domains and all free plans, while Search stays allowed. The trap nobody’s reading closely: because Googlebot and Bingbot are multi-purpose, blocking “AI training” can also drop you out of Google and Bing search — and…
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Google’s AI Overviews Are Becoming AI Mode: What Default Expansion and Generative UI Mean for GEO
In late August 2026 Google started auto-expanding AI Overviews into full AI Mode-style answers for some queries — and rolling generative UI (on-the-fly calculators, converters, comparison tools) into AI Overviews. Two changes, one direction. Here is what it actually means for your GEO strategy, and what not to conclude yet.
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Google’s August 2026 Spam Update Is Also an AI-Citation Update — Here’s Why That Matters for GEO
Google’s August 2026 spam update finished rolling out on Aug 21 — the longest of the year’s three. Google named zero policies, yet trade media is already calling it the “AI content crackdown.” Here’s what it actually means for GEO, why a spam update is now an AI-visibility event, and what not to conclude yet.