How do brands get recommended by ChatGPT? Deana Burke tested it for $11.25 and published the misses. Everyone is selling AEO and GEO right now, answer engine optimisation, generative engine optimisation, AI search visibility, get your brand into the AI answer. Almost none of them have tested whether it works. Deana Burke (@wetclaude) of Boys Club queried Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini roughly 8,700 times on what to buy and found the models largely agreed with each other. She called it the AI shelf. Then she built a fake deodorant brand on an $11.25 domain to see whether the shelf moves. It moved on two longtail queries with browsing on. It did not move on best, cheapest, aluminium free, or what people actually recommend, and Claude and Gemini never named it at all. Which tells you what the AEO industry is really selling, and what happens when AI agents start buying on our behalf. Follow for weekly AI governance analysis. #AEO #GEO #AISearch #AI #chatgpt

Every snake oil salesperson and their dog is on the AOGO bandwagon right now. How do I get my brand onto chat GPT? How do I make sure that I'm the answer? And there's a deck for it and a retainer and a dashboard and almost nobody's selling it is actually testing whether the thing that they're selling actually works. It's too volatile, it's too maneuverable. Deanna Burke has and if you aren't following her you're really missing out some amazing analysis. So Deanna writes Boyce Club and she's doing the empirical work that large media organisations should be doing themselves given they're the ones with the most to lose. But it's often easier to trade in snake oil though isn't it? So in June she asked Claude chat GPT and Gemini what to buy 8,700 times and found that three models built by three different companies drawing on a lot of the same web mostly agree with each other in terms of ranking products. She called it the AI shelf and that's the consensus of product has to get onto before AI will name it at all. Then she tested whether the shelf moves and so she spent 11 dollars and 25 cents for a domain, three pages of AI written copy, one launch essay and then she left it untouched for 30 days and when she came back, chat GPT was recommending her deodorant brand. But hilariously enough there was no deodorant, it was just the domain, some copy and the sub-stack and that was enough. And to her enormous credit she's been publishing the misses too. So the brand landed four out of four on questions about magnesium and baking soda irritation named first every time. So she called it a dusty corner of the shelf and it was basically showing up because no incumbent was there defending it. On 13 other queries the ones that actually carry more commercial weight, best cheapest aluminium free, what people genuinely recommend, she didn't get anything and Claude and Gemini never named it once. So turning browsing off and it vanishes. So her testing has been quite meticulous. And I've been on the other side of this for years. So sitting with clients pulling a part aside, working out why 600 word block posts and a $5,000 monthly retainer hadn't produced any ranking movement at all. And I'd have to say that you know the money hadn't been wasted on bad execution so much as it got spent buying into a game where the returns go to her who ever can afford it. And there seems to be some nostalgia forming regarding search and it's absolute bullshit. SEO wasn't clean. It was bought, link farms expired, domain networks, parasite hosting, media companies rebuilt around it, hired for it, commissioned for it, and they got flattened anyway. So we could see that this was coming because there are absolutely ways to game it. Berk has just demonstrated that with the $11 and the sub stack. But what's scary is what comes next when agents start doing our bidding and that shelf stops returning a recommendation and starts purchasing automatically. So this reminds us. These are dalliance systems. You can flirt with them but they are not ready for you to bet the house on them and every retainer being sold right now is priced as if they can.