I sat down with Garrett Sussman, Director of Marketing at iPullRank, a few weeks ago. We covered a lot of ground (the full conversation drops next week) but there's one point he made that's worth hearing before you read the rest of this edition.

When it comes to AI-generated content, we need to stop judging how it was produced and start judging the output. The brands getting this right are the ones building proper workflows, not copy-pasting at scale.

That's the key point. The quality bar has moved. And if you've got the right workflow in place, AI becomes a tool for producing better content faster, not a shortcut for producing worse content cheaper.

Which brings me to what we've been building.

Six months ago, you could spot AI-generated content from a mile off. Stilted phrasing, no real data, zero personality. That gap has closed. The content AI produces now is genuinely good. In some categories, it's indistinguishable from what a skilled human writer would produce.

That should concern every marketer who doesn't yet have a structured workflow for optimising their content for AI search.

Because here's what's actually happening: AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity are deciding which sources to cite based on how well content is structured, how specific its claims are and whether it carries the right authority signals. The quality of your writing matters less than whether it's built to be found by these models. And most marketing teams still don't have a process for that.

This is something we've been building at Obsero. Since launch, the most common question from customers has been the same: "I can see the data. Now what do I do about it?" So we built the answer.

The Content Optimiser is Obsero's first Growth Agent. Submit any piece of content, choose the prompt you want to be visible for, and it returns a citation score out of 100 benchmarked against the top five sources AI models are currently citing. Then you refine it through a chat-like interface, watching the score move in real time.

Every recommendation is grounded in what AI models are actually citing for your specific prompt, not generic templates.

And it works. We published an article on whether ChatGPT gives the same results to everyone. This week, Google's AI Overview started citing it.

Want to see it in action? Get in touch and we'll set you up with a trial

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OpenAI's acquisition of TBPN, the daily tech podcast hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, caught most people off guard. Some OpenAI employees reportedly thought it was a late April Fools' joke.

But this isn't without precedent. We've seen tech giants acquire media properties to shape narrative and drive influence. Elon Musk bought X. Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post. The format changes but the playbook is the same: when you're building something that reshapes how people interact with information, you want to control how the story is told.

The deal was spearheaded by Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of AGI Deployment. Which makes it more interesting, not less. Simo has been the executive pushing OpenAI to stop chasing side quests and focus. She was behind the decision to kill Sora. She was sceptical of Instant Checkout, which we covered here on Franc Talking. So for Simo to personally drive this acquisition tells you she sees communications as a strategic priority, not a distraction.

Then, days later, more news. Simo announced she's taking medical leave for several weeks to manage a neuroimmune condition. Brad Lightcap is moving from COO to a new "special projects" role reporting directly to Altman. Kate Rouch, OpenAI's CMO, is stepping down to focus on cancer recovery. And Greg Brockman will manage product while Simo is out.

That's a lot of change at once for a company preparing for an IPO later this year. Denise Dresser, the former Slack CEO who joined as chief revenue officer, will pick up some of Lightcap's commercial responsibilities. But the broader picture is clear: OpenAI's leadership structure is shifting, and the executive who appears to have brought the most discipline to the company is temporarily off the field.

This caught my eye for obvious reasons given what we do at Obsero. Time magazine is packaging up its AI search visibility insights and selling them as a paid product to brands.

The numbers are striking. Time claims its properties generate between 30 and 50 million AI citations per month. Working with a company called Mobian, they analysed 750 brands and found that 17% of AI citations were either misaligned with the brand's positioning or factually inaccurate. That's a significant gap between what brands want AI to say about them and what it actually says.

The product works like this: Time analyses what a brand's advertising says about itself, then cross-references that against what ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are actually saying. They generate up to 100 prompts per brand and score how closely the AI answers match the brand's own messaging. Where there's a gap, Time creates branded content designed to close it, published on Time's platform and YouTube, then tracks whether AI models start citing it.

One detail that stood out: they ran an analysis for a large automotive company and found that small YouTubers with under 1,000 subscribers were influencing the brand's AI search answers more than its own website. That's a massive opportunity. If a niche creator with a tiny audience can shape what AI says about a major brand, imagine what a focused content strategy from the brand itself could do.

It's extremely interesting to see a media outlet of this scale packaging up its influence within AI search and selling it directly to brands. Time isn't the only one either. Forbes and Future are building similar offerings. And the smartest affiliate teams I've worked with at Obsero are already pivoting towards this model, using their domain authority and content expertise to sell AI search visibility as a service.

This is the market validating what we've been saying: understanding how AI models cite, recommend and describe your brand is no longer optional. Publishers are productising it. Affiliate teams are pivoting towards it. And the brands that don't have a strategy for shaping their presence across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews are going to find their narrative being written by sources they've never heard of.

🔍 Google & Search