Rent.

TL;DR this week:

Everybody wants a cut of your audience now. OpenAI just opened an Ads Manager inside ChatGPT with no minimum spend, which means the answer your customer reads can be bought by whoever bids highest. Google is testing the same move inside AI Mode while handing publishers "Preferred Sources" as a consolation prize. And the citation data in What The Bots Are Reading shows the rent you're already paying without noticing: Reddit and Quora pulled 52.5% of all AI citations last quarter, beating brand domains outright. Your hard-won expertise is being summarized by a model that would rather quote a four-year-old forum thread than your own page.

The thread running through In Case You Missed It is the same one. The space between you and your buyer is filling up with toll booths, and the toll keeps going up. You can pay it forever, or you can build content the models cite on its own merits. Strategy You Can Steal and Feed the Engine show you how to do the second thing before Friday.

Let's build.

— ZC

What's the last AI answer you saw about your category that cited a competitor or a random forum instead of you? Best answers go in next week's issue.

This week's term: Fan-out queries

A fan-out query is what happens when an AI search engine takes one question and silently splits it into several smaller searches behind the scenes. You ask Google AI Mode "what's the best content tool for a seed-stage startup," and instead of running that as a single search, the system fans it out into a dozen sub-questions: pricing, integrations, comparisons, reviews, alternatives. Then it stitches the results into one answer.

This matters because it changes what "ranking for a keyword" even means. You're no longer competing for one query. You're competing for every sub-question the model invents on its own, most of which you'll never see in a keyword tool. A page that answers only the headline question can lose to a page that quietly covers the sub-questions too. It also explains this week's citation data: forums win because they accidentally cover the long tail of sub-questions in one sprawling thread, while a tidy brand page often answers only the obvious one.

The practical move is to build pages that anticipate the fan-out, with clear sections for the adjacent questions a buyer actually has, each answered in an extractable chunk.

Next time someone in your Slack says "we're ranking #1 for our keyword," you can say "cool, but AI Mode fans that query into ten sub-questions, are we cited on the other nine?"

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.

If you're in the top half of that list, you're flying blind in the exact channel that's eating your search traffic.

The fix isn't another dashboard, it's scoring content for citation-readiness before it ships, so visibility is designed in instead of measured after the fact.

That's what Content Scoring in Averi is built for →

We've been writing about the measurement gap all year. AI referral traffic is tripling but 84% of brands don't track it. Impressions are up but clicks are down and nobody knows which pages are being cited versus which are being skipped. Content teams are publishing into the void because the data lives in four different dashboards that nobody checks consistently.

Analytics is live inside Averi.

AI Referral Traffic. See exactly how much traffic ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot are sending to your site. Not buried in a GA4 segment you have to build yourself — surfaced automatically, broken out by AI engine, with trends over time. When we say AI referral traffic converts at 3x the rate of traditional organic, now you can verify that against your own data.

Search Query Performance. Every query your site ranks for — with impressions, clicks, CTR, and average position — pulled directly from Google Search Console and displayed inside the same dashboard as your content queue and strategy map. Sort by impressions to find your highest-visibility queries. Sort by CTR to find the interception gaps where you're getting seen but not clicked. Filter by position to find the queries where one structural edit could move you from page two to the AI Overview.

Per-Content Performance. Every piece of content you've published through Averi — with individual impressions, clicks, average position, and trend lines. See which pages are compounding and which are decaying. See which pieces justified the time you invested and which need a refresh. No more switching between your CMS, Search Console, and a spreadsheet to answer the question "is this working?"

The thesis behind this feature is the same thesis behind the newsletter: the content engine doesn't stop at publish. Strategy, drafting, scoring, publishing, and now measurement live in one workflow. You build the strategy in the Strategy Map. You draft and score in the Content Queue. You publish to your CMS. And now you see the results — AI referral traffic, search queries, per-content performance — without leaving Averi.

See your analytics →

72% of top-ranking pages in Google's March 2026 core update featured detailed author credentials — up from 58% before the update. Pages with named authors and verifiable bios earn 2.3x more AI citations than pages attributed to "Admin" or "Team."

Google has been building toward this for years. E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) has always listed expertise as a ranking signal, but the March core update made it structural: pages with a named human author, a linked bio with verifiable credentials, and an active presence on external platforms are outperforming anonymous content by a measurable margin. AI citation systems are following the same pattern. When ChatGPT retrieves two passages that answer the same question, the one attributed to a named expert with a verifiable identity gets selected over the one attributed to nobody.

The mechanism is entity resolution. Google and AI systems maintain knowledge graphs — databases of known entities (people, organizations, concepts) and the relationships between them. When your author name appears on your site, on LinkedIn, in podcast transcripts, in guest posts on other domains, and in schema markup — the system connects those signals into a single entity. That entity builds authority every time it's referenced. An author with 50 cross-platform mentions is a stronger citation signal than an author who exists only on one domain.

Three things to do this week. First, check every blog post on your site — if any are attributed to "Admin," "Team," or no author at all, add a real name with a linked bio page. Second, add Person schema to your author bio pages with sameAs links pointing to your LinkedIn, Twitter, and any other profiles. This explicitly tells search engines and AI systems that these are the same person. Third, make sure your LinkedIn headline and summary match the expertise your site claims. If your blog says you're an expert in AI content strategy, your LinkedIn should say the same thing — AI systems cross-reference.

The compounding effect matters here. Every guest post, every podcast appearance, every LinkedIn article, every conference talk builds your author entity. Over time, the system doesn't just trust your page. It trusts you — and everything you publish inherits that trust. That's why founder-led content compounds faster than brand content: the founder is a citable entity. The brand blog under "Admin" is not.

Next week: The Compounding Game — why month 6 looks nothing like month 1, with real data.

Build your author entity → Brand Core in Averi

From February 27 to May 26, AI engines cited Averi 95,431 times.

Over the same 89 days, traditional Bing search showed us in 10,378 impressions. Our Google impressions fell 31%.

Three datasets, one site, one quarter, and the engine that grew is the one that powers ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and a growing share of how B2B buyers evaluate software.

I pulled the numbers off my own webmaster tools this week, expecting to see a worse story than I'd been telling my team. What I found was the opposite.

This piece is the data: the methodology, the trajectory, what AI cites us for, and what it means for any B2B startup still treating Google rankings as the scoreboard.

If you've been refreshing Google Search Console waiting for traffic to come back, this is the page that's going to change what you watch.

ChatGPT will happily talk about your brand. It just won't tell anyone where to find you.

That's the uncomfortable takeaway from Otterly's 2026 AI Citations Report, which analyzed more than 1 million citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews from January and February.

The headline number is the one sitting at the top of this issue: community platforms like Reddit and Quora captured 52.5% of all AI citations, while brand domains took just 47.5%. The models are sourcing answers about your category from forum threads more often than from the companies that actually built the products.

Dig into the platforms and the picture sharpens. Google AI Overviews showed the strongest preference for brand domains at 59.8% of citations and handed out the most clickable links, so a citation there can still send real traffic. ChatGPT cited brand domains only 44.7% of the time and routinely mentions a company without linking to it, which means you can be "in the answer" and still invisible. Perplexity was the most community-heavy of all, citing brand domains just 28.9% of the time and pulling 16.9% of its citations from Reddit alone.

Why does any of this move the needle? Because being cited is no longer a vanity metric. Brands referenced inside AI-generated answers see roughly a 38% lift in organic clicks, and AI Overviews now appear on about 48% of queries. When half of searches resolve in an answer box, the citation is the new click.

What this means for startups: you can't out-post Reddit, and you shouldn't try. What you can do is publish the thing a model trusts more than a forum thread, which is a verifiable, well-structured, sourced answer tied to a consistent brand identity it can resolve as an entity. That's not theory for us. We grew Averi's own traffic 6,000% in 10 months to 2.9 million monthly organic impressions using the same structure, and the pages that get cited are the ones built answer-first, not the ones stuffed with keywords. The forums will always win volume. You win on being the source worth quoting.

📊 By the numbers

Snapchat — "Less Social Media. More Snapchat."

Every social platform in 2026 is chasing the same thing… more time on feed, more content consumed, more engagement metrics to report to advertisers. Snapchat looked at that race and decided to run in the opposite direction.

The campaign, which rolled out across OOH, digital, and broadcast this spring, positions Snapchat explicitly against the category it belongs to. Not "we're the best social media app." Not "we're different from other social media." The line is: "Less Social Media. More Snapchat." The brand is asking to be recategorized entirely.

The creative is stark. Clean typography on flat backgrounds. No product screenshots. No influencer cameos. No trending audio. Each execution names a specific thing social media does that Snapchat doesn't — the performance pressure, the follower count anxiety, the algorithmic feed designed to keep you scrolling past content from strangers. Then it names what Snapchat offers instead: real friends, real moments, no likes counter, no public follower count, a camera that opens by default instead of a feed.

Why we love it: This is an entity play disguised as an ad campaign. The same week Feed the Engine covers author entity signals — how Google and AI systems build identity by connecting distinct signals into a single recognizable node — Snapchat is doing the exact same thing at the brand level. It's not optimizing its position within the social media category. It's withdrawing from the category and defining a new one. In knowledge graph terms, Snapchat is saying: don't resolve me as a social media entity. Resolve me as something else.

The strategic courage is in what's missing. There are no usage stats. No "300 million daily active users" flex. No comparison charts. The campaign trusts that the audience already knows what social media feels like — and that naming the feeling out loud is enough to make the alternative compelling. In a market where every platform is screaming about features and AI integrations, Snapchat bought billboards that essentially say "we do less."

Results: The campaign generated coverage in Campaign, Adweek, and The Drum within the first week. Snap's Q1 2026 earnings showed daily active users up 9% year-over-year to 422 million, with time spent per user increasing — suggesting the "less social media" positioning is resonating with exactly the audience that was leaving other platforms. The campaign is ongoing and expanding into new markets through Q3.

The algorithm could never decide that the most effective way to grow a social media company is to tell people to use less social media. That requires understanding a cultural mood that no engagement metric captures — the exhaustion with performance, the craving for something that feels private and real, the willingness to choose a platform specifically because it asks less of you. Data says optimize for engagement. The human insight said optimize for relief.

The startup takeaway: The most powerful positioning move isn't claiming you're better than the category. It's refusing to be in the category at all.

🔗 See the campaign

FEATURED:

If you want a fast, affordable hit of practitioner-level digital marketing without burning a week and a flight budget, this is the one. DigiMarCon Southeast runs two days across SEO, paid media, content, social, analytics, and emerging tech, with both in-person and virtual passes starting around $224. For a founder or solo marketer, the value is the cross-discipline mix in one room: you can pressure-test your AI search strategy against people doing paid and content side by side, then be back at your desk by Friday. The virtual option means you don't even have to leave Slack. → Details

Six open roles where AI content, GEO, and AEO show up directly in the title or scope of the work.

Three of this week's six listings are at companies that have never publicly hired for AEO/GEO before — Stripe, Experian Health, and ADT. The discipline is moving from "agency specialty" to "in-house owned function" at large enterprise brands. Average AEO compensation is now $86,556 in the US per ZipRecruiter, with senior roles clearing $174K. This is a market that priced itself in over the past 12 months.

Getting certified first → Averi Academy

Know of a GEO or AI content role that should be here? Reply with the link and we'll feature it next week.

Did You Know? —  The sources LLMs cite for a given topic can shift by as much as 80% in just two months, per Backlinko research.

The visibility you "won" in an AI answer isn't a ranking you hold, it's rent you re-earn every cycle, which is exactly why this week's theme keeps you up at night.

Til next time,