🤔 Thinking of starting your own newsletter? Try beehiiv and get 20% off your first three months!
Try beehiiv and get 20% off your first three months.
One of the best things I've ever done was start a newsletter.
I learnt a new skill. I write about my passion (AI search) and it's become the best business development channel I have. Prospects reply to editions. Clients mention stories weeks later. It has put me in rooms I'd never have got into cold.
The reality is a newsletter builds your personal brand while you sleep, and beehiiv makes the whole thing painless to run. There's ad revenue and a partner programme on top if you want it, but the audience is the asset.
Get paid for something you love doing. Sign up with my referral link and get 20% off your first three months.
🗣️ This week’s stories
Five stories from the week in AI search.
Chris Green ran 1,000 prompts ten times each and found ChatGPT routes retrieval through different backends - Labrador handles ~88% (mostly evergreen queries), with Bright Data, Oxylabs and SERP pulled in for news and time-sensitive stuff. When the backend switches, the URLs it cites overlap only about half as much. If you're tracking a prompt once and calling that your visibility, you may just be seeing one pipeline. Track repeatedly, and treat evergreen and news-y prompts as separate battles.
Three weeks after landing in the UK, OpenAI is hiring ad teams in Paris, Munich and Dublin - plus an EMEA lead - taking the pilot to 10 markets and covering Europe's three biggest ad economies (62% of regional ad revenue).
Cloudflare's Sept 15 mixed-use crackdown is a year in the making, but one reverse-engineer reckons ~25% of publisher traffic is already stealth scrapers posing as humans. The robots.txt debate is the visible bit; the black market routing round it is the actual story.
OpenAI's new family arrives in three flavours - Sol, Terra and Luna - and the pitch is unusually pointed: Sol beats Anthropic's Fable 5 on coding benchmarks while using half the tokens and costing a third less. There's also ChatGPT Work, an enterprise companion for docs, sheets and decks. A busy week for OpenAI.
Juozas Kaziukėnas spotted a "Check for me" button in Google's AI Mode while shopping for a chef's knife - it goes off and verifies local stock for you, unsupervised. Announced back at I/O, but this is one of the first sightings of it live, and the version that fills web forms or phones shops directly isn't far behind.
🖥️ How to set up an MCP and connect to Obsero
The Obsero connector plugging into Claude. This section covers what an MCP is and how to set one up.
What is an MCP?
Let's strip out the jargon. An MCP - Model Context Protocol - is just a way of plugging your tools into Claude so they actually talk to each other. Think of it as a universal adapter. You connect Slack, Notion, your analytics, your CRM, whatever you use, into your Claude desktop app, and suddenly you're not copy-pasting between fifteen tabs. You're asking one question and getting an answer that pulls from all of them.
And it doesn't stop at reading. You can overlay tools: pull data from one, act on it in another. Ask for a summary, then post it straight to Slack. No export, no re-formatting, no faff.
MCP: a word of caution
One word of caution before you go plugging everything in: an MCP has genuine access to your systems, so only connect servers you trust, check what permissions you're handing over, and think twice before wiring anything to sensitive company data. Start small, test it, then expand.
Benefits of using an MCP
The obvious one is time. You stop being the courier between your tools. No exporting a CSV from one platform to reformat for another, no screenshotting dashboards into decks. You ask the question and the answer arrives with the data already in it.
The less obvious one is chaining. Because the AI can read from one tool and act in another, whole workflows collapse into a single conversation. Pull your visibility data, compare it against last month, draft the summary, post it to your team channel. One request, four tools, no tabs.
Obsero MCP is now live across all packages
Which brings me to the Obsero MCP.
Below, I've put together a step-by-step guide to getting it set up - and more importantly, what it actually does for you once it's running.
I'm not going to bore you with citation matrices and brand entity mapping. You don't care. What you care about is: which publishers are shaping how AI talks about your brand, where your competitors are eating your lunch, and what to do about it this week.
That's what this gives you.
Step by step guide to setting up the Obsero MCP
You can connect any MCP this way, so in case you want to do this for PostHog, ElevenLabs or Fireflies - just follow the same process. If you want to see a video of me using the beehiiv MCP, you can view it here.
Open your desktop Claude app and hit settings:
Settings lives in the top corner of the Claude desktop app.
Under customise click ‘connectors’:
Connectors sits under the customise menu.
At the top of the panel click ‘add custom connector’:
Add custom connector is at the top of the panel.
In custom connector, fill in the name ‘Obsero’ and the MCP URL ‘https://mcp.obsero.ai’:
Name it Obsero and paste in mcp.obsero.ai
You will then be sent to app.obsero.ai, where you need to select ‘allow access’:
Obsero asks you to approve access. This is the permissions check from the caution section above.
You can then click open the Claude app to return to the desktop app:
One click back to the desktop app.
You will then see this screen highlighting that you are connected to the Obsero MCP:
Obsero now shows in your connector list.
You can then ask Claude whether you are connected to the Obsero MCP or not:
Ask Claude directly. It confirms the connection and lists what it can pull.
You can then query Obsero in Claude to pull in your data and run analysis:
A live query. Claude pulls visibility data straight from Obsero.
The recommendations. Six publishers to reach out to, ranked by how often AI cites them.
If you’re keen to try Obsero out, we have a free trial here. No credit card required! You can sign up in less than five minutes. 🎉
That is it for this week.
Apologies for the late send… had a late night following England’s victory over Norway on Saturday. 🏴 🥳
Enjoy the week ahead. 🤞
Andy