Surfaced - AI Search Intelligence - August 17th

Last issue I said organizational change is where my head has been, and that I wanted to get more of it into this newsletter.

A quote that stood out from Paul Gibbons posted this week with three data points stacked together: McKinsey finds only 6% of companies capturing real enterprise-wide value from AI. PwC's latest CEO survey puts positive financial impact, cost or revenue or both, at roughly 31%. And a CFO told him through comments plainly that they'd spent two million and he wasn't sure what the token spend bought. Yikes.

His argument is that when you ask why adoption stalls, everyone says the same words. Culture, change, leadership, skills, talent, trust. The human side.

He closes by asking which one is actually stalling your rollout: trust, capability, or who's accountable for it.

Solve for trust.

That's the simplest framing I've seen for what I'm watching in AI search and what wins, so I'm stealing it for this issue. Feels oddly reminiscent of earlier Google days when they said: “optimize for the user experience.”

Endless data studies come out that are giving everyone whiplash, and it feels like people are waiting for the dust to settle.

Related, and worth two minutes: I wrote up the case for audio and video last week. Short version, the formats that are still expensive to fake are the ones worth investing in, and that's a trust argument wearing a content strategy costume. I truly think there’s a lot of value there.

Onward!

Two weeks ago I called Cloudflare the hero we all needed, which in hindsight was generous.

On August 6, they shipped “Agent Readiness” and an AEO” tab straight into the Cloudflare dashboard. Citation Rate, Prominence, Mention Rate, Share of Voice, and something called Industry Fit. It probes Claude and GPT with category prompts and scores how you show up.

It’s CRAZY that even Cloudflare is even jumping in on the action!

The three takeaways:

1) They measure where everyone else estimates. Their own headline number is that fewer than half of all HTML page requests now come from a human. That's not a sampled panel or a scraped inference, that's traffic passing through their network. Every AI visibility vendor you're evaluating is inferring what Cloudflare can just see.

2) They decide who your competitors are. Cloudflare pre-computes a benchmark panel once per category and reuses it across every account in that category. They query the models without naming your brand, record which sites get cited, and that becomes the baseline. So your Share of Voice is measured against a competitive set Cloudflare assembled.

3) The crawl-versus-referral report finally exists. “AI Operator Activity”, they call it, shows real crawl and referral traffic per operator, plus the errors they hit. The pattern they tell you to act on is the operator that crawls thousands of your pages and refers nobody.

Now, these guys are making moves. They already run pay-per-crawl. They already flipped default bot blocking on for new and free-tier customers starting September 15. In July they booted up Monetization Gateway, which charges agents for access to content, which is like a digital turnstile.

Toll booth, bouncer, and referee…all from the same company…yup.

My thought is Cloudflare is well positioned to enter the space, maybe not as a prompt measurement solution, but an all-encompassing internet/hosting/DNS solution, now with pretty insane measurement.

Small disclosure since it's relevant: I'm in the middle of moving some properties Cloudflare, so I'll be running these reports on my own site. I'll share what the numbers actually look like from the inside.

Anthropic watermarks consumed all the oxygen this week, and I’ll say one thing about it: It makes no difference for marketers, a lot of companies have been doing similar things, and was under Article 50 of the EU AI Act (in force since Aug 2), saying AI outputs must now carry a machine-readable mark or else they get a huge 3% global revenue fine so they had to do it.

Moving on.

The ownership question came back this week, and this time with two surveys that flatly disagree. Love that.

Muck Rack's State of PR found 73% of comms professionals call AEO at least somewhat important, and 29% say nobody at their organization owns it at all. Where it is owned, it's scattered: 24% PR and comms, 11% marketing leadership. I saw that inside at Intuit, and survey data when I was at Brandlight.

BrightEdge surveyed 750-plus marketers and got close to the opposite. 54% said SEO or digital owns it, more than every other function combined. I worked there, too!

Both are probably right. They surveyed different rooms. Ask the comms org who owns AEO and you get a blank stare, ask the search org and you get a hand raised because it’s been on their mandate. They were defaulted to it cause they are search, even though everyone benefits.

Krinal Mehta’s recent map makes it all look simple in the best way possibe. It’s a team sport.

What LLMs say about your brand gets assembled out of seven (or more) functions: brand, product, product marketing, pricing, paid, social, and content. Not one of them reports to whoever is being held accountable for AI visibility. That’s okay, cause the entire industry is still figuring that out.

A Scrunch and Scribewise survey backs this up from the other direction. 81% of marketers say more collaboration from technical teams like web dev (eligibility layer) would improve their AI visibility strategy. 76% say the same about input from sales (context layer).

When I was at RBC, AI entered the org, and I was deemed a ‘champion’ to bring AI workflows into our function. Despite being in a regulated industry, it was tough to move things forward; a lot of tokens bit the dust in attempts to get smart. Our team adopted using it for light (non-client) marketing copy, but our distribution was global, and we couldn’t unlock the context layer due to compliance. It was tough.

Education is still very early (despite scrolling LinkedIn for 5 minutes you feel like you’re 2 years behind).

Everyone will have challenges depending on the size and maturity of the org you work with, but what holds is the need for alignment.

Most companies I talk to are still trying to silo and figure out what to measure instead of changing the patterns that prohibit their true unlock.

On Reddit, r/SEO was dominated by two threads: (1) GEO tactic skepticism post-cats.txt — "how do we know what's actually working?". Mark Williams-Cook has this epic experiment to show how llms.txt has no more authority than making a cats.txt.

And (2) Traffic loss triage — "down 40% since AI Mode, has anyone recovered?" Measurement paralysis continues: GSC now shows AI impressions, GA4 doesn't reflect them, and nobody can tie it to revenue.

It still surprises me so many people are going to Reddit to learn marketing, it shouldn’t. But the measurement talk on Reddit is getting repetitive at this point, so I’ll try to be selective about what I share in the future.

Comparison content is now the most commercially important format in AI search.

Based on the Moz 50K fan-out data: Entity + comparison prompts drive 97% of brand mentions. NINETY-SEVEN PERCENT.

Most brands have little to no comparison content, and honestly, it’s killing them. Listicles have been good for a long time, but X vs Y content has been king for over a year now, and data continues to prove it - there’s a lot.

The reason why isn’t just for a search landing page - if you don’t have any owned content talking about yourself with competitors, these platforms will grab from the cess-pools of the internet and fill in the blank.

Own your narrative.

Buying a ChatGPT ad doesn't make you a cited source.

SE Ranking has research that came out last week that reframes paid vs. earned distinction in AI search. Personally, I’m very curious about holistic AI search data whenever I can get it cause it will be really important to understand.

• They found that 96% of advertisers whose ads appeared were not cited in the AI answer beside the ad.

• But also, of the 50k commercial prompts they analyzed, ChatGPT an overall ad rate of 25.94%.

• That’s really close to what they saw in Google’s AI Mode in February, where ads appeared for 29.45% of commercial queries.

As more flock to spending in AI search, we’ll see those numbers continue to rise.

Side tangent: I was using ChatGPT a few days ago, using it to help with a video game I was playing (super embarrassing). I got served an ad for Garage Door repair on that conversation, which I’ve never researched ever…so…I think targeting has a long way to go.

Prompt Maintenance & Hygiene

Your prompt set should mimic your context layer. You know, that thing that is centralized to understanding your brand, product, offering, and audience.

It's also the thing that decides what your AI visibility number even means. It’s the most important decision when signing up for a tool or monitoring how you’re being seen or talked about within conversational search.

This week:

1. Have everyone touching AI search paste their working prompts into one shared doc by Friday. Everyone. Including the agency, if you have one.

2. Read what comes back. You'll find duplicates, contradictions, and people using the wrong inputs to get things back.

3. Realign your prompts to match how your audience looks for you, using data if you can. You are really trying to be as close to customes/consumers as you can.

4. Have one person who does this. Not a team, one name, and add to the goals for the quarter.

5. Keep hygiene on this because it makes sure your entire team is aligned and being consistent with what you are outputting from it.

For mature companies, create a map of all your primary customer research, 0P, 1P and 3P data - everything else you have that your competitors don’t. Create prompts out of that, and cross-reference vs. the ones you are currently using.

I bet there will be a world of difference between synthetically created prompts and ones that are asked on Reddit, G2, your support + sales calls, etc.

Note: Careful when changing prompts around, your data will fluctuate a lot so it’s best to try to be consistent. Changing around a handful will cause huge dips you’ll have to explain later.

❝

"We have Profound, why would we hire someone when that tells me what I should be focused on?"

An actual person from a call I had last week.

Tell me the last time a tool created a strategy.

Open up Semrush, Ahrefs, or whatever end-to-end SEO agent is promising to run your brand this quarter. Go to recommendations, site audit, whatever it's called.

You get a strawberry, peach, or kiwi colored rating and a list.

Twenty years of this and the list still isn't good. Not because the engineering is bad, it's genuinely impressive with AI accelerating engineering so quickly. Because the tool has a domain, a few competitors you typed in yourself, and no idea what your business does with money.

“Generic AI Tool” is a good product. It'll tell you you're mentioned in 12% of prompts in your category, your competitor sits at 34%, and here are 180 prompts where you're invisible. All true and useful.

Now rank those 180.

The tool weights them by volume, because volume is what it can see. It doesn't know that 40 of them serve the segment with your worst retention. Or that the highest-volume one is a comparison prompt you lose on price every time and always will. Or that three prompts nobody is chasing map to your highest-margin line.

It also doesn't know that the schema fix sitting at the top needs engineering, legal, and a brand review, and will take five months. Green in the dashboard but has no idea what’s cooking operationally.

The list is real, and the ranking of the list is the entire shooting match through prioritization and judgement.

I've built these dashboards. I ran SEO at BrightEdge and market insights at Brandlight, an AEO platform. I'm not dunking on the category, I helped make it. The good ones are honest that they measure visibility. Visibility and value are different words.

So absolutely keep your AI tool (I can help if you need, just ask), we’re all trying to understand where we are, but don’t mistake a platform for a sound strategy.

I’ll be checking out some of these ‘agentic seo’ products so you don’t have to, and if they are good, I’ll let you know.

But from what I’ve seen, it’s E2E autopiloted nonsense.

Enjoy the last few weeks of summer!

Until next time,

Andrew