How do AI answer engines decide which sources to cite?
Retrieval-augmented generation picks passages, not pages. Understanding the four steps between a question and a citation explains most of what people find mysterious about AI visibility.
Insights
Insights
Notes on how answer engines pick their sources, how new markets are actually tested, and why good deals stall. Every figure carries the study it came from.
Getting found when buyers ask AI
How retrieval works, where AI answers get their information, and what makes a page eligible to be cited. See the service →
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What actually works in AEO, and what does not
Very little in answer engine optimisation has controlled evidence behind it. One peer-reviewed study, a handful of large descriptive datasets, and a great deal of confident assertion. That...
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How do you measure AI visibility honestly?
You measure AI visibility by running a fixed set of buyer questions across each engine on a schedule, and recording four things per run: whether you were named,...
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Which sources should you fix first if AI is not naming you?
Start with the surfaces you can edit today, in the order of how much of the cited material they account for. Yext analysed 6.8 million citations from 1.6...
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How do you write a page an AI engine can actually quote?
By making every section survive being read entirely on its own. An answer engine does not retrieve your page — it retrieves a chunk of it, drops that...
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Why are buyers asking AI before they ask you?
Because it is faster, and because it works well enough. A buyer with a shortlist to build used to open five tabs and read five sets of marketing...
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What to ask an AEO agency before you hire one
Nine questions that separate a real answer engine optimisation practice from a renamed SEO package, and what a weak answer to each one sounds like.
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Schema and sameAs: how a model decides your company exists
Before an engine can recommend you it has to resolve which company you are. That is an entity problem, and structured data with a complete sameAs array is...
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Half of what AI cites about you is not on your website
Yext analysed 6.8 million AI citations and found 42% came from listings and profiles against 44% from first-party sites. If half the surface area sits outside your CMS,...
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Ranking top ten used to mean getting cited. Ahrefs says that halved in eight months.
In July 2025, 76% of pages cited in Google AI Overviews also ranked in the top ten. By March 2026, Ahrefs measured 38%. What that change does and...
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No major AI crawler runs your JavaScript. Here is how to check in one command.
Vercel and MERJ found that none of the major AI crawlers execute JavaScript. If your content only appears after JavaScript runs, most answer engines never see it. Here...
Entering a new market
What an entry costs before the first order, how to test a segment without hiring into it, and why technical products fail for non-technical reasons. See the service →
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Why do technical products fail in new markets for non-technical reasons?
Because the product was never the variable. A technical product that works in Germany still works in Spain — the specification does not change at the border. What...
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How do you test a country or segment before committing headcount?
Run it as a sequence of four cheap tests, in an order where each one can kill the project before you spend money on the next. Define the...
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What does a market entry actually cost before the first order?
Mostly it costs a year and a salary, and the salary is the smaller half. The visible cost of entering a new country or segment is the person...
Turning interest into signed deals
Why most B2B deals are lost to nobody, who actually decides, and what to change when a deal goes quiet. See the service →
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What should you change when a deal goes quiet?
First work out which kind of quiet it is, because the three kinds need opposite responses. A deal that was never real needs closing out, not rescuing. A...
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Who actually decides in a B2B purchase, and why do they stall?
Rarely one person, and rarely the person you have been talking to. In most considered B2B purchases the decision is made by a group with different incentives, different...
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Why are most B2B deals lost to nobody?
Because the most common competitor in a B2B deal is not another supplier — it is the buyer deciding to do nothing. The JOLT Effect research, drawn from...
Find out what the engines currently say about you
Send me your company name and website. I run a set of buyer questions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google's AI Overviews, and send back a recorded walkthrough of what came out: where you appeared, where you did not, who was named instead, and the two or three structural reasons why. No charge, no obligation, and you keep the findings whether or not you decide to hire me.
I run these myself, so there is a queue. Expect a few working days rather than an instant report.