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A short one this week. Mike and I are running a free live webinar at 3pm UK on 17 November on the metrics that actually matter, plus the week's stories, led by Reddit going logged-in only.
GEO
+3
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.
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
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.
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.
Two stories told a single one this week. Anthropic is reportedly raising at a $900bn valuation while OpenAI is missing its user targets and its CFO Sarah Friar is being left out of key meetings. The gap between the two is no longer about models. It's about whose business the market believes in.
OpenAI shipped Images 2.0 and ChatGPT 5.5 in the same week, while still working out how to monetise the rest of it. BrightonSEO lands on Friday. And the GEO vs SEO debate continues to suck oxygen out of conversations that should be about helping clients adapt. Let's get into it.
Claude Design landed this week and it properly moves the dial on what a small team can ship. Slides, wireframes, prototypes, landing pages in one chat; your brand applied automatically. Plus OpenAI's ads get serious, the AI search category continues to grow and Obsero launches 'Obsero Local'.
Garrett Sussman never started with keywords. He starts with cognitive biases. As Director of Marketing at iPullRank, he helped build a 20-chapter AI Search Manual that's now generating leads directly through ChatGPT citations. In this conversation, we get into why the way you phrase a prompt changes everything, how to report on AI search when precision is gone and what marketing leaders should actually be prioritising right now.
Video
Six months ago, you could spot AI-generated content a mile off. Robotic phrasing, no real data, zero personality. That gap has closed. This week, I'm breaking down why every marketer now needs an AI content optimisation workflow, what OpenAI's podcast acquisition and leadership reshuffle signals about the race to control narrative, and why Time magazine is now selling GEO insights directly to brands. Plus the tool we've built at Obsero to help you act on all of it.
This week: Google AIOs are appearing for breaking news more than ever, and Top Stories are being pushed down as a result. Trustpilot's annual results put a number on what AI search citation visibility is actually worth (spoiler: it moved the share price). Plus, who's winning AI search in the protein category, why CX research now matters more than keyword volumes, and what Obsero shipped this week.
+7
This week: how GPT-5.3 Instant and GPT-5.4 Thinking behave differently and what it means for your brand, why Rightmove's ChatGPT app launch raises a bigger question about discovery, and the news clips worth your time from Harry Clarkson-Bennett of The Telegraph.
