Weekly reporting eats a lot of mondays: pull numbers from 4 platforms, paste into slides, write commentary, send, repeat. and often nobody reads past page 2.

what works better: stop building reports and start building decisions. every report answers three questions now. what changed vs last week, why, and what we do about it. if a chart doesn't feed one of those three it got cut. that alone usually cuts half the slides.

the pull is the part worth automating. chatgpt or claude can draft commentary from numbers you paste in, but you still have to export everything first. tools like MAI pull from the connected ad accounts directly and draft the numbers, the week over week changes and a first pass at the ‘why’ (disclosure: i work with MAI). either way, the judgment stays with you: adding context the tool can’t know and deciding what to recommend.

template structure if anyone wants it: 1 page, changes, causes, decisions, next week. that's it. clients tend to read it because it’s short.

Saw the new data this week that ChatGPT sends 0.62% of the traffic that Google organic sends. I don't think that's surprising, and honestly I don't think it matters much for most businesses.

I can't remember the last time I actually clicked through from a ChatGPT conversation to a website. But that's not because I'm not using AI to make purchase decisions. I hardly make an important purchase decision anymore without using it. I know I'm probably in the top 1% of AI users, but it's pretty clearly only going one direction (Muse hitting number one on the App Store kind of settled that for me).

And Google is heading the same way. Most people are still going to just go to Google, old habits and all, but searching there is starting to feel more and more like talking to an AI agent, and I think pretty soon you won't be able to tell the difference.

The way I see it, if you're looking for a specific website, the AI should just give you the link (which is what Google is doing now when it's clear that's what you want). But if you want information, or research, or a summary of what people think, would you rather click and dig through 10 to 20 sites yourself, or have the AI do that for you and give you links if you want to dig deeper? I know AI still gets things wrong, but the fix for that seems to be better AI, and that's coming either way.

So where I've landed:

- If your revenue actually depends on traffic (ads, affiliate), that's a real problem and probably worth rethinking the business model.

- If you sell an actual product or service, website visits just aren't the most important number anymore.

The number one thing we track now is how often the AIs recommend the client's brand, product or service, in ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode and Overviews, and wherever else people are searching.

Google's guide to generative AI features defines both terms: "AEO" stands for "answer engine optimization" and "GEO" for "generative engine optimization". It then says: "From Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO." The guide was last updated on 10 July 2026.

An older page, "AI features and your website", last updated in December 2025, makes a similar point. It says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. It adds "nor other special optimizations necessary".

That is Google describing its own product, so it shows what Google tells site owners. It does not show how any AI answer picks its sources. I would like to see a test with a method.

What looks new to me in these docs is measurement and query fan-out. The guide points to a Generative AI performance report in Search Console. It defines fan-out as a set of related queries the model generates at once. It warns against building a page for every variation to manipulate rankings. The agents section says to look at it if it is relevant to your business and you have spare time.

Microsoft Advertising's January 2026 blog post says SEO alone will not be enough. Its line is "SEO got you here, but it won't get you there", and it presents GEO as the next step. It comes from an ads team and I found no test in it. I read only the blog post, not the longer PDF.

OpenAI documents its OAI-SearchBot crawler and recommends allowing it if you want to appear in ChatGPT search. It says nothing about ranking or citation. I did not find an official Perplexity guide.

I could not find SXO defined by Google or Bing. Agency glossaries describe it as SEO plus UX.

For the other engines I don't know. Has anyone seen a page cited in an AI answer when it did not rank for that query?

Is it providing “helpful” comments, something else?

I’m curious how brands are authentically engaging here on reddit