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.

Something shifted this week. Not a headline. A default setting.

On Monday, Shopify flipped a switch and 5.6 million stores became shoppable inside ChatGPT. No merchant opted in. No setup form was filled out. The products were just there — discoverable, comparable, purchasable — because agentic commerce stopped being a roadmap slide and became the default.

That's the word that defined this week. Default.

AI product discovery is now the default for every Shopify store. GEO budgets are now the default for more than half of marketers. Google's algorithm instability — three updates in six weeks — is the default operating condition for anyone publishing content. And a federal judge just made it clear that blacklisting an AI company for disagreeing with the government is not going to be the default legal standard. Not yet, anyway.

When something becomes the default, the window for early-mover advantage closes fast. The brands that optimized their catalog data before this week are already showing up in ChatGPT answers. The ones scrambling to figure out what "agentic storefronts" means are already behind.

This issue is built around that closing window. The AI-Readiness Audit gives you a 90-minute sprint to make sure the bots can actually read your data. What The Bots Are Reading breaks down why structured product data — not backlinks, not domain authority — is what AI agents use to decide who gets recommended. And we shipped GEO & SEO Content Scoring inside Averi, so every piece you write now gets graded for both Google and AI search before you hit publish.

The transition from "AI is coming" to "AI is the default" happened this week.

And it wasn't loud. It was a toggle in a Shopify admin that most merchants didn't even notice.

Let's build.

— ZC & The Averi Team

Here's the problem we kept running into: you publish a piece of content, it looks great, it reads well — and then it just sits there. Doesn't rank. Doesn't get cited by ChatGPT. Doesn't show up in Perplexity. You're left wondering what went wrong, and the answer is usually buried across six different tools and a dozen blog posts about "best practices."

So we built a scoring system that tells you before you publish whether your content is optimized for both Google and AI search — in one number.

Every piece of content in Averi now gets an SEO + GEO composite score (0-100). SEO is weighted at 55%. GEO is weighted at 45%. The score updates in real time as you write.

Here's what it actually checks:

→ SEO signals — keyword coverage, content structure, heading hierarchy, readability, meta title and description, internal links, image alt text. The fundamentals that still drive Google rankings.

→ GEO signals — citation-worthiness (do you have statistics with attribution? original claims? expert quotes?), extractability (are your answers front-loaded in 40-60 word blocks that LLMs can pull cleanly?), entity density (named people, companies, frameworks), E-E-A-T markers, and whether your site even lets AI crawlers in.

→ Actionable recommendations — every check that scores below its max generates a specific fix, prioritized by how much it would improve your composite score.

Not: "improve your content quality."

More like: "Add citations from different authority types (government, academic, industry)"

Why this matters right now: every piece of data in this newsletter says the same thing. Being found isn't enough — you have to be selected. ChatGPT throws away 85% of what it retrieves. Google's AI Overviews are driving impressions up but traffic down. The content that wins is structured for extraction, loaded with citable data, and optimized for both the algorithm and the AI. That's exactly what the scoring system measures.

No other content platform scores for GEO. That's the gap we're closing.

— Averi Team

Every section of this newsletter exists because the rules of content marketing are being rewritten in real time. Fan-out queries. AI citation surfaces. GEO. LinkedIn as a citation source. Content scoring. None of this was in anyone's playbook two years ago.

We built Averi Academy to help you learn all of it.

It's a free certification program designed to turn content marketers into AI-powered content marketers — the people who understand how to create content that ranks on Google and gets cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot. You'll learn the frameworks, workflows, and strategies we write about in DFTA every week, structured into lessons you can actually execute on.

Finish the program, earn a certificate you can add straight to your LinkedIn profile.

Whether you're a founder running marketing solo, a content marketer leveling up your skillset, or someone eyeing one of those roles in Don't Let AI Replace You — this is built for you.

👉 Become a Certified AI Content Engineer →

You're a CEO. You have 47 other priorities. The last thing you need is another acronym.

But here's why this one deserves 10 minutes: the way your buyers discover, evaluate, and shortlist products is changing faster than at any point since Google replaced the Yellow Pages.

And the change is invisible to every metric you're probably tracking.

ChatGPT handles over a billion searches per week.

Perplexity processes 100+ million monthly.

Google's own AI Overviews now appear on 13%+ of queries — and growing.

Your brand's presence (or absence) in these AI-generated answers is shaping buyer decisions before your sales team ever gets a call.

This is what GEO addresses. And the window to build visibility is open now — because most of your competitors haven't started.

The bots aren't just reading your content anymore. They're reading your product catalog.

On March 24, Shopify activated Agentic Storefronts by default for 5.6 million stores. Every product — its title, description, price, inventory, images, and attributes — is now being ingested by ChatGPT, Copilot, Google AI Mode, and Gemini. Not crawled from the web. Syndicated directly from Shopify's Catalog, processed through specialized LLMs that categorize and standardize product data so AI agents can parse it, compare it, and recommend it in real time.

This isn't a content play. This is the bots reading structured commerce data — and deciding which products to surface when someone says "best waterproof hiking boots under $150."

The numbers confirm the shift is already happening. AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores is up 7x since January 2025. AI-attributed orders are up 11x over the same period. And that was before Agentic Storefronts went default. OpenAI tried keeping the entire transaction inside the chat window with Instant Checkout — and killed it after merchants pushed back. The new architecture: AI discovers, your storefront closes. The bot handles the top of the funnel. Your site handles the sale.

The ranking signals are different too. For product queries, catalog completeness, description clarity, and price-to-intent match matter more than backlinks or domain authority. Vague product titles like "Blue Shirt M/L" won't surface. Listings with specific material descriptions, use-case language, and structured size details will. This is SEO for products, but the rules were written by AI retrieval systems — not Google's PageRank.

Meanwhile, the GEO budget data is catching up to the reality. A Scribewise survey this week confirmed that 55% of marketers now have dedicated GEO budgets — up from essentially zero 18 months ago. Agency PMG recommends GEO pilot budgets at 1.5-2x existing search spend. The metric shift is telling: clicks are giving way to brand mention rates as the primary KPI. Only 23% of marketers are investing in prompt tracking and GEO measurement — which means the 55% allocating budget are mostly flying blind on whether it's working. The measurement gap is the next problem to solve.

And Google's own data confirms why. Impressions from AI Overviews are up 49% — but traffic from those impressions is down. Visibility no longer automatically translates into clicks. You can show up in the answer and still get nothing. The value is shifting from being found to being the source the AI chooses to cite or recommend. Whether that's a blog post, a LinkedIn article, or a product listing, the selection logic is the same: structured data, specificity, and freshness win.

What this means for startups: If you sell a product, audit your catalog data this week. If you sell a service, audit your content for the same attributes AI uses to select products: specificity, structured data, clear descriptions, and real-time accuracy. The bots are reading everything — and they're shopping now.

📊 By the numbers:

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.

Dr Pepper — The TikTok Jingle That Became a Prime-Time Ad

A creator posted a playful, homemade Dr Pepper jingle on TikTok. It wasn't polished. It wasn't produced. It was a person, a melody, and a can of soda.

It hit 42 million views, 5 million likes, and 300,000 saves.

Here's where most brands would have messed it up: they would have taken the concept, re-recorded it in a studio with professional talent, cleaned up the audio, shot it on a soundstage, and published a version that looked like every other brand video on the internet. The soul of the thing would have been surgically removed in the name of "brand consistency."

Dr Pepper did the opposite. They shared the original video — untouched, unpolished, exactly as the creator made it. Then they aired the jingle during the College Football Playoff National Championship.

A TikTok from someone's bedroom. On national television. During one of the biggest sporting events of the year.

Why we love it: The restraint is the strategy. Dr Pepper recognized that the thing making the video work wasn't production quality — it was authenticity. The slightly imperfect audio. The genuine enthusiasm. The fact that it clearly wasn't made for a brand deal. Recreating it would have killed exactly what made people share it in the first place.

The media math worked too. The creator's organic video had already proven the concept with 42 million views before Dr Pepper spent a dollar amplifying it. By the time it aired during the playoff, the jingle already had cultural momentum. The broadcast wasn't a launch — it was a graduation.

And the strategic sequencing is what makes this a masterclass. Step one: a creator makes something people love. Step two: the brand validates it by sharing it as-is. Step three: the brand scales it to the biggest stage available. At no point did Dr Pepper try to own the moment. They just gave it a bigger room.

The algorithm could never recognize that a bedroom TikTok with imperfect audio had more commercial potential than a six-figure studio production — then have the discipline to not touch it.

The startup takeaway: The best content about your brand might already exist. Your job isn't to create it. It's to find it, respect it, and give it a bigger stage.

🔗 Watch the original TikTok

Strategy You Can Steal

The AI-Readiness Audit

What it is: A 90-minute sprint to audit how AI systems see your brand — across both your content and your product/service data — then fix the gaps that are costing you discovery and citations.

Time commitment: 90 minutes, 4 blocks

Block 1: See What the Bots See (20 min)

Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode. Run 10 queries your ideal customer would ask — a mix of product/service discovery ("best [category] for [use case]"), comparison ("X vs Y"), and how-to queries related to your space. For each: Are you cited or recommended? If not, who is? Look at the sources that are showing up. What do they have that you don't? Write down the pattern. It's almost always: more specific titles, clearer descriptions, structured data, and recently updated content.

Block 2: Audit Your Structured Data (25 min)

If you sell products: open your catalog (Shopify, your CMS, wherever your listings live). Pull your top 20 items. For each one, check: Is the title specific enough to match a natural-language query? Does the description include use-case language, not just feature specs? Are attributes complete — materials, dimensions, compatibility, price? Is inventory status accurate and up to date? If you sell services or content: run the same audit on your top 20 pages. Does the H1 match a query someone would actually type? Is the answer front-loaded in the first 30% of the page? Do you have schema markup? Are named entities (people, companies, frameworks) present — pages with 15+ entities show 4.8x higher citation probability?

Block 3: Fix the Top 5 Gaps (30 min)

You don't need to overhaul everything. Pick the five listings or pages with the biggest gap between their importance to your business and their AI readiness. Rewrite product titles to be query-specific ("Waterproof Trail Running Shoes for Wide Feet" not "TrailMax Pro V2"). Add use-case language to descriptions ("Designed for 10+ mile runs in wet conditions" not "Premium performance technology"). Front-load answers in content pages. Add missing schema markup. Update anything that hasn't been touched in 90+ days — content updated within 30 days gets 3.2x more Perplexity citations.

Block 4: Set Your Measurement Baseline (15 min)

You can't improve what you can't see. Open Bing Webmaster Tools and check the AI Performance dashboard — it's the only official tool showing how often your content is cited in Copilot and AI-generated Bing answers. If you're on Shopify, check your Sales Channels for Agentic Storefronts attribution — every order from an AI channel now shows which platform referred it. In Google Analytics, create a custom channel group for AI referral traffic (chat.openai.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com). Screenshot everything. This is your day-zero baseline. Check it again in 30 days.

Why this works: 55% of marketers now have GEO budgets, but only 23% are investing in measurement. That means most companies are spending money to show up in AI answers without knowing whether it's working. This audit gives you both sides: the fixes that make your data AI-readable and the measurement setup to prove it's driving results. The brands that close the gap between spending and measuring will own the next 12 months of AI discovery.

Know of a role that should be here? Reply to this email and we'll feature it next week.

Did You Know? —  AI-attributed orders on Shopify are up 11x since January 2025 — and most merchants didn't even know their products were showing up in ChatGPT until this week.

Til next time,