[State of AEO Call Recording] Julian broke down Microsoft's insider view of how AI search actually selects its sources — straight from an SEO Week 2026 keynote by a Microsoft AI Product Manager. The big idea: AI doesn't rank pages, it runs a multi-step evidence construction process across dozens of parallel sub-queries, and only sources with broad topical coverage survive it. 1. 🔀 Query Fanout: AI decomposes one question into 5–100+ parallel sub-queries targeting different topical angles — not keyword variations. 2. 🏷️ Entity Anchoring: Fan-out queries resolve to named, established entities, giving brands with strong entity presence a structural advantage in retrieval. 3. 🧠 Multi-Model Judgment: Before an answer is assembled, multiple models cross-check candidate sources in a consensus layer that's invisible from the outside. 4. 📊 Citation Share vs. Recommendation: Citation share audits topical authority, but brand recommendation in commercial queries — driven by reviews and third-party mentions — is the real revenue metric. 5. 🗺️ Semantic Breadth Wins: Cover the full entity landscape around your topic; referencing competitors and adjacent platforms signals market context and increases topical credibility. 6. 🔧 Technical Foundations: Confirm AI bot crawl access, submit via IndexNow for Bing/ChatGPT visibility, and publish full transcripts so video and podcast content is machine-readable. Julian will be out for three weeks — pre-published guides on schema markup, AI literacy, and AI frameworks will keep the community building in the meantime. Thank you for making us a #1 bestseller! The revolution is officially here. [Link to The AEO Blueprint on Amazon]

[State of AEO Call Recording] Ran a fully community-driven session on three tightly connected challenges: how to measure AEO accurately, how to decode the sub-searches AI runs behind every prompt, and how to build content that serves the bot as a first-class user. The big idea: AI isn't a high-volume traffic channel yet — but it's the most important infrastructure to build into now, before it becomes crowded. 1. 📊 Track brand recommendations, not citations: If competitors are being recommended while you're only cited as a source, you're missing the trust signals — reviews, off-site validation — that AI uses to select winners. 2. 🎯 Only track commercial queries: "How" and "what is" queries almost never produce brand recommendations. Stick to transactional and commercial prompts where AI is actively shaping purchase decisions. 3. 🔍 Use the ChatGPT Search Final Queries Chrome extension: This free tool surfaces the sub-queries AI runs behind every prompt — revealing exactly what signals (reviews, entities, sources) the model is validating before composing its answer. 4. 🌐 Off-site presence is non-negotiable: AI follows a three-stage research path — listicles to identify brands, UGC and reviews to validate them, brand sites to extract details. Absent from off-site sources means absent from recommendations. 5. 🌳 Build the tree: Trunk content establishes topical authority, branches cover related entities and FAQs, and fruits are narrow use-case landing pages targeting specific commercial queries — all interlinked so authority flows toward conversion. 6. 🤖 Automate your measurement stack: Run 5–10 curated commercial queries manually first to preserve the buyer's-eye view, then automate via N8N into Google Sheets tracking brand mentions, position, and visibility scores over time. The businesses building precise query tracking, off-site validation, and bot-optimized content architecture today will have a compounding structural advantage that purely website-focused competitors will struggle to close.

[State of AEO Call Recording] [State of AEO Slide Deck] [The AEO AI Readiness Guide] Surfaced the core challenge facing AEO practitioners: knowing about AI is not the same as using it at a level that changes business outcomes. The session mapped a realistic path from passive AI awareness to agentic proficiency — and why closing that gap matters now. 1. 📊 The Proficiency Gap: Community survey shows most members stuck at mid-level use — aware and prompting but not yet operating at an advanced or agentic level. 2. 🪜 The Proficiency Ladder: Three levels — chatbot prompting, workflow automation (n8n), and agentic coding (Claude Code) — each unlocking meaningfully different output quality and speed. 3. ⚡ AI as Culture: Like electricity in factories, layering AI onto manual workflows produces minimal gains — processes must be redesigned as AI-first from the ground up. 4. 🛠️ The Marketing Engineer: A hybrid role combining technical build skills with marketing judgment — the person who knows what's possible and, critically, what's worth building. 5. 🚀 Empowerment Over Headcount: Small businesses have the better opportunity — use agentic orchestration to scale capability exponentially without scaling cost or cutting team members. Thank you for making us a #1 bestseller! The revolution is officially here. [Link to The AEO Blueprint on Amazon]

Still ChatGPT... but Gemini/AI Mode is trending up. 🐱‍👤

...Not so fast! Remember how we discussed fixing your website technicals and indexability issues over "just adding a llms.txt" Here's what's happening to ClickUp (and what happened to Hubspot before them). - ClickUp created nearly 2,000 blog articles optimized for AI systems, covering categories where they lack expertise (AI CRM, private calendar apps, visual collaboration, etc.). - The company lost approximately 7 million in estimated organic traffic from Google since February 2025, according to Ahrefs data. - Despite search losses, ClickUp is performing well in LLM rankings within the software category. - Google is actively cracking down on this type of content strategy, and ChatGPT is showing signs of evolving its search capabilities. Key takeaway: - We don't believe in a world of scarcity or laziness; we know that in a future world with lower compute cost the real lever will be our strategic vision and the taste to build what truly matters. Source: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chris-long-marketing_clickup-may-end-becoming-a-cautionary-seo-share-7448350296990400512-ub9M/?utm_source=tldrmarketing