Research11 min
The state of AEO in 2026: Claude is not ChatGPT
Across roughly 35,000 URLs associated with 400 queries, 79.2% of Claude's cited URLs also appeared in Brave's top 10.
Josh Blyskal · AEO & GEO researcher
I study how to make brands visible in AI search.
I joined Profound as its second employee and now lead AI Strategy & Research there. I compare how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI products research products, resolve brand identity, and decide which brands appear in an answer.
I use research drawn from more than 10 billion AI citations and 1.5 billion real user prompts across at least eight answer engines to map the customer questions, search queries, product facts, and public pages that determine whether a brand appears.
How I approach the work
I want a brand to be easy for an answer engine or agent to find, understand, and recommend.
When somebody asks what to buy, who to trust, or how to solve a problem, answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude have to find information they can use about the relevant brands. If a brand is missing from that process, it is missing from the answer.
I look at what customers ask, what the engines search, and which websites, product information, and public sources shape the recommendation. Then I work to fix whichever part is missing, whether that is product data, a page on the brand site, or credible third-party coverage.
Read the 250 million response study →Original research
I study what makes a brand appear in an AI-generated answer.
That includes the prompts people ask, the fanouts an agent/answer engine runs, and the websites, product data, and public information it uses to understand and recommend a brand to a user.
Browse all research →Selected research
3 studiesResearch12 min
What 250 million AI search results say gets cited
Traditional SEO metrics explained only 4% to 7% of citation variance across 1,311 pages.
Research10 min
Why Reddit became AI search's most-cited domain
Reddit ranked first in the aggregate dataset, appearing in 3.11% of citations across the tracked answer engines.
SAGE for AEO
I invented SAGE to create a system for AEO so teams always know what the next constraint is—and what the next highest-leverage action should be.
Read the full method →- 01Setup
- 02Analyze
- 03Generate
- 04Engineer
A simple example
Imagine the team tracks 20 prompts every week and the brand suddenly stops appearing in ChatGPT for five of them. Instead of immediately writing a new page, open those five responses and see what changed: which competitors now appear, which websites ChatGPT used, or maybe whether it searched for a different fanout phrase. SAGE exists as a system to orient the best marketing teams in the world.
Selected work and press
External proofFeatured presentation
We analysed 10,000,000 AI search results: here's what we found
A BrightonSEO keynote on why the same brand can appear differently across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Copilot, and what marketers can do about it.
brightonSEO · Brighton, United Kingdom · April 2025
Get in touch
If you want to talk about the research, I'm easy to reach.
For conference bookings, research collaboration, or commentary on AI search, email me directly.
josh@tryprofound.com