This website uses cookies
Read our Privacy policy and Terms of use for more information.
Co-founder of Obsero and founder of Be Franc. Writing on AI search, marketing and growth.
Three studies landed in the same week, and the industry decided AI search is a distraction. The numbers are fine. The measure is wrong, and judging AI search on referral traffic is like judging a goalkeeper on goals scored.
GEO
+3
A client asked for their URLs mapped to the prompts they want to win in AI search, so their PR team knows which sites to pitch. Here's how I built it in Claude with Obsero's MCP connector, using Levi's as the worked example, plus why your ChatGPT traffic probably didn't drop this week.
Obsero has raised $1.2 million, led by SFC Capital alongside a mix of angel investors, as we look to help brands become visible in AI search and turn that visibility into performance and revenue.
+2
Five of us went down to the seaside for two days on the stand: Mike, Dan, Irene, Matty and me. It was a chance to hear first-hand what the people closest to organic growth are worried about, what they think of our proposition and what they want next, so this is my write-up of all of it, from why we went to what we’d change in April.
This week I stepped back from Pepperstone, my first Be Franc client, to focus on Obsero. Here's what I learned about AI search there, and what an investor in Dublin says VCs actually look for.
+8
Voice search was the most overhyped trend in SEO, built on a stat that was never what people thought it was. With AI on the other end, people are talking instead of typing.
+11
Five steps to audit what AI says about your brand, and the 20 prompts to start with. Both free, and neither needs a tool to get going (although Obsero does help...)
+5
Seven months from a standing start to a billion-dollar run rate, on a product that still sells one ad format, but the opportunity is clear.
The question most brands already ask, and why almost none of them can use the answer.
Google closed off its results on 26 August. ChatGPT's shopping answers look very different, the US has a merchant feed to fall back on and the UK has nothing underneath. Plus why one prompt is never a number, and Obsero turns one.
+4
Reddit's ChatGPT citations really did collapse on 8 August. The same content held its position in Google AI Overviews, so this is a week to check the other engines before you touch anything.
Weekly
OpenAI's announcement mentioned better use of sources. It did not mention a 5x jump, or ChatGPT going to sites by name. This week I look at what actually changed in the data on 8 August, and what 1,500 fan-outs on Levi's say about buying prompts.
This week: OpenAI's new shopping carousel ad unit, the evidence Obsero's already capturing on it and what I think has been building for years at Google DeepMind, now that Demis Hassabis has stepped back as CEO.
Every week, a handful of people click through to your site from an AI answer. Google Analytics shows you those. What it can't show you is the much bigger number of AI bots reading your pages to write those answers in the first place, and closing that blind spot is what we've spent the last few weeks building.
The real maths behind AI visibility tracking, plus what's new in Obsero's prompt window.
What actually feeds the map pack, what feeds the citations, and what happened when I ran my own gym through it across four towns - two established sites, one opening in 2027, and one town they're not in at all.
This week is a practical one. MCPs are quietly becoming the biggest shift in how marketers work with AI, so I'm stripping out the jargon: what they are, what they're actually good for and how to set one up in about five minutes. Plus the usual roundup, including ChatGPT's retrieval backends exposed, OpenAI's ad push into Europe and Google's "Check for me" button spotted in the wild.
This week, a walkthrough of building your own AI citation report in Claude. I use a skill to turn a raw citations export into a dashboard that shows which publishers AI cites in your category, who mentions your brand and who doesn't, and the sites worth pitching. Write it once, and Claude runs the whole thing for you next time.
I wanted to know who AI actually cites when it answers questions about running apps. So I pointed an AI agent at the Obsero raw data and built a dashboard to show it, start to finish. Then Cannes made it timely: AI search was the top conversation there this year, every CMO asking the same thing, how do we show up in AI answers and how do we measure it.
Tom Wilson played a bully in a film 40 years ago and has been answering the same questions ever since. This week, what he did about it, and why it is the most useful lesson in AI I can give you.
+6
There is a way to measure how strongly AI associates your brand with the subjects that matter, and most brands have never looked. Here is how the scoring works, and the gap it exposed.
ChatGPT launched ten days into the last World Cup. When Lionel Messi lifted the trophy in Qatar, consumer AI basically didn't exist. Four years on, millions of people will ask AI who's winning this one. So I did exactly that, at scale.
Perplexity
Google I/O this week brought over 100 announcements. Buried inside them were four changes that will directly affect how visible your brand is in AI search. Here's what you need to know. But first....
AI Search
When I started in SEO, Google was practically the whole game. This week they've published their first official guide to AI search optimisation. A document about a world where Google is no longer the sole player. The bulk of the advice is solid. The framing tells you everything about where Google still wants the conversation to live.
Social media changed politics in 2016. AI search will change it in 2029. We pointed Obsero at 10,000 prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, AI Mode and Perplexity to see which parties they were surfacing, which sources they trusted and which issues each party owned. The findings tell us something the polls couldn't.
