Hey there,

Welcome back to another Don’t Feed The Algorithm, your weekly dispatch from Averi — where we explore the intersections of marketing, AI and the future of work.

There's a quiet shift happening, and it's easy to miss if you're only watching traffic dashboards.

This week, we dug into something that keeps coming up in our conversations with founders: the bots are picking favorites. Perplexity cites sources in 97% of its responses. ChatGPT? Just 16%. Google AI Overviews split the difference. Each platform has different preferences, different trust signals, different content it rewards. There's no "AI SEO" anymore — just three separate games with three separate rulebooks.

That sounds exhausting. But here's the part that makes it worth paying attention: AI search traffic converts at 5x the rate of traditional Google traffic. Smaller pond, bigger fish.

Meanwhile, GEO went from "thing we put in thought leadership pieces" to actual job descriptions. This week's job board includes dedicated Generative Engine Optimization roles at IHG, FirstKey Homes, and ClickHouse. Anthropic's hiring an SEO Lead for Claude. OpenAI wants a Vertical Marketing Lead. The infrastructure is getting built — fast.

And in "The Algorithm Could Never," we're featuring Jacquemus putting his 97-year-old grandmother in a campaign instead of a 22-year-old influencer with perfect metrics. It worked spectacularly. Because sometimes the most strategic thing you can do is be completely unpredictable.

The through-line? The systems are fragmenting, the playbooks are multiplying, and the winners are the ones who can read the room — not just the algorithm.

This week: what the bots are actually citing, a 90-minute GEO audit you can run before your next planning session, 9 AI marketing roles worth watching, and the data that explains why your About page might be tanking your AI visibility.

Let’s build.

— ZC & The Averi Team

We hit 1.68 million Google impressions this month using the Averi Workflow

That's not a client. That's us.

We didn't build Averi based on a guess — we built it from the exact content strategy that's driving our own growth. Same playbook. Same system. Now productized so you can run it too.

Here's what actually moves the needle:

→ Topical authority over content volume. 12 tightly clustered articles outperform 50 disconnected posts. Every time.

→ Internal linking that compounds. Not an afterthought — the architecture that tells Google (and AI) you own the topic.

→ Optimized for where buyers actually search. Google rankings. ChatGPT citations. Perplexity answers. If your content isn't built for all three, you're leaving visibility on the table.

We're not asking you to trust a pitch. We're asking you to try the system that took us from zero to nearly 2 million monthly impressions in just 10 months — while everyone else was arguing about blog post frequency.

The Free beta is live and new features are being shipped daily based on the feedback from readers like you.

— Averi Team

Scaling content as a startup is f*cking hard.

Most advice is either too generic or written by people who've never shipped anything claiming to be a guru.

So we’ve launched r/startupcontentlab: a Reddit community for founders, engineers & marketers who are tired of sifting through the hordes of articles that just want your ‘click’ and don’t actually help you to build content engines that actually drive growth.

This is a place for real strategy, AI workflows, what's trending, and honest conversations about what's actually driving growth (and what's not). Just people figuring it out and sharing what they learn.

If you're building content systems to scale your startup, you'll fit right in.

Join our Reddit Community for Startup Founders building Content Engines to grow their businesses:

The Future of Storytelling: How AI Can Help Human Marketers Create Meaningful Connections

There's a moment in every great campfire story, right before the resolution, when the flames flicker and shadows dance across faces… where time seems to suspend itself.

Our ancestors knew this feeling intimately. Before the written word, before the printing press, before the algorithm, humans gathered in circles to share tales that would bind communities together and transmit wisdom across generations.

Now here we are, in an era where a machine can generate a thousand blog posts before your morning coffee cools, and we're left wondering… have we lost the fire?

The future of storytelling isn't about choosing between silicon and soul, it's about understanding what each does best and orchestrating them in symphony.

We all know the industry loves to pretend it’s got it all figured out.

But here?

We tell the truth.

Every week, we’re asking you to share how things really work behind the scenes. Because getting better starts with getting honest.

Don’t worry, it’s a safe space.

Drop your vote.

Jacquemus — "The Original Icon"

When Jacquemus teased its first-ever brand ambassador, the fashion world assumed the obvious: Kendall Jenner. Lisa from BLACKPINK. Bad Bunny. Someone with millions of followers and a face that moves product.

Instead, Simon Porte Jacquemus chose his 79-year-old grandmother, Liline.

Born in 1946 in Alleins, a tiny village in the south of France, Liline grew up in a farming family raised by an Italian single mother. She's never been an influencer. She doesn't have a public Instagram. She's simply the woman who shaped Simon's vision of elegance, authenticity, and strength — the qualities that built a billion-dollar fashion house.

The announcement came with a satirical "ambassador contract" requiring Liline to never use the word "brand" (only "family"), never wear other designers ("even in dreams"), and always smile. It was playful, warm, and disarmingly human.

The Result:

The announcement dominated fashion media for days. WWD, Vogue, and lifestyle publications covered it as both news and cultural commentary. The imagery — Liline in pristine Jacquemus, holding the Valérie bag named after Simon's late mother — went viral not for its production value but for what it represented: a luxury brand choosing meaning over metrics.

The move cemented Jacquemus's positioning as a fashion house built on heritage and heart, not algorithmic optimization. In an industry racing to sign the same rotating cast of celebrities, they zigged hard — and owned the conversation.

Why We Love It:

An AI optimizing for ambassador ROI would have flagged this immediately:

⚠️ "Ambassador has 0 social media following — projected reach: NEGLIGIBLE" ⚠️ "Age demographic (79) outside target consumer profile (18-34)" ⚠️ "No prior brand ambassador experience detected — engagement risk: HIGH" ⚠️ "Competitor analysis: 94% of luxury ambassador selections are celebrities with 10M+ followers" ⚠️ "Recommendation: Consider Lisa (BLACKPINK) — 103M followers, proven luxury conversion"

Every data model would have been right. Every influencer marketing platform would have ranked Liline dead last.

But Jacquemus understood what the algorithm couldn't: authenticity has no follower count. In a world where every brand is chasing the same celebrities, the most disruptive choice is the one that actually means something. Liline isn't an ambassador — she's the reason the brand exists.

Sometimes the most powerful marketing decision is choosing the story that's already true.

Want to see more of the best marketed companies on the planet? 👇

The Citation Gap: Why 84% of Your AI Visibility Strategy Might Be Wasted

New data reveals a stark truth, most content never gets cited by AI — and the platforms that do cite have wildly different standards.

The headline number: Perplexity cites sources in 97% of responses. Google AI Overviews? 34%. ChatGPT? Just 16%. And Gemini provides zero clickable citations in 92% of its answers.

Translation: if you're optimizing for "AI search" as a monolith, you're optimizing for nothing.

Where each bot shops for answers:

🔍 Perplexity → Real-time web search on every query. Cites multiple sources per response. Reddit-heavy (46.5% of top citations). Rewards freshness and direct answers. Traffic is trackable in GA4.

🤖 ChatGPT → Searches only when browsing is enabled. 24% of responses generated with zero web fetches. When it does cite, Wikipedia dominates (47.9% of top citations). Prefers encyclopedic authority.

🌐 Google AI Overviews → Most balanced sourcing. Reddit (21%), YouTube (18.8%), Quora (14.3%). Favors diversified cross-platform presence. 93.67% of citations link to top-10 organic results — but only 4.5% match Page 1 URLs exactly.

The conversion kicker: AI search traffic converts at 4.4x the rate of traditional Google traffic. The catch? You're competing for dramatically fewer citation slots.

What gets you in the door:

What keeps you invisible:

The bottom line: There's no universal "AI SEO" anymore. Perplexity rewards real-time relevance and Reddit presence. ChatGPT rewards Wikipedia-style authority. Google AI Overviews reward platform diversity.

Pick your platform based on where your audience actually searches — then optimize accordingly.

→ The GEO Playbook 2026: Getting Cited by LLMs | → How to Get Cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity & AI Search

Strategy You Can Steal

The "GEO Audit Sprint" — 90 Minutes to AI Search Readiness

Most startups know they should be optimizing for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Almost none of them have actually checked whether they're showing up. Here's how to run a quick GEO audit before your next planning session:

Block 1: Discovery Check (30 min)

Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google (with AI Overviews enabled). Ask each one:

Screenshot every response. Note: Are you mentioned? Are you cited? Are competitors showing up instead? This is your baseline.

Block 2: Citation Trace (30 min)

For every competitor that does get cited, click through to the source. Ask yourself:

Pattern recognition here is everything. LLMs have preferences — figure out what they're rewarding in your space.

Block 3: Gap Map (30 min)

Compare what you found to what you have. Build a simple 3-column doc:

Prioritize Column 2 first — restructuring existing content is faster than creating new. Add schema markup, clearer definitions, and direct answers in the first 100 words.

The output: You now have a prioritized GEO roadmap that took 90 minutes instead of a $15K agency audit. Run this quarterly. The landscape is shifting fast.

This is the exact sprint we run with early Averi users before building their content strategy — because you can't optimize for visibility you haven't measured.

Did You Know? —  Only 22% of marketers are actively tracking AI visibility and traffic — yet AI search visitors convert at 14.2% compared to Google's 2.8% (that's 5x higher). Meanwhile, Gen AI traffic is growing 165x faster than organic search traffic.

The opportunity gap is massive, and most of your competitors aren't even watching the scoreboard.

Til next time,