The Agentic Operator @AgenticOperator

@oldstackjournal all the best 🤝

@CyrusShepard this is what i find in literally every audit. ten pages and none of them say "we do X for Y because Z" in plain text. AI can't grab what you never wrote down clearly. basics beat the fancy stuff every single time.

@Marie_Haynes google just dropped the bar for search profiles ... 35K followers on youtube, insta, or X gets you in now. if you're anywhere near that, go claim yours before google auto-generates one that describes you wrong.

I came across a Modern Retail survey this week, and the numbers are pretty telling. 27% of marketers have no GEO or AEO strategy. Another 16% aren't even familiar with the terms. That's 43% of marketers either not working on this or not even aware of it. Meanwhile, AI-influenced commerce is already becoming real money. Last Cyber Week, 1 in 5 orders reportedly involved an AI agent, representing around $70B in GMV. So there's a pretty big gap: AI is already influencing purchases. A huge chunk of marketers are still figuring out what it even means. I've seen this pattern before. Social. Mobile. Now AI. Every time, a group of brands gets in early while everyone else waits for the channel to become "proven." Then the market catches up. Except by then, the early movers already have the audience, data, content, and distribution. That's the part I'd be worried about. The biggest cost of ignoring AI search isn't missing today's traffic. It's letting someone else build the advantage while you're waiting. The window is open. And it's not going to stay this easy forever.

@oldstackjournal ha appreciate that lars. honestly just been heads down doing the work and posting what i find. the audience finds you when the content is real. means a lot coming from a builder like you though......

This problem hasn't hit most brands yet. But I can see it coming. You spend 3 months building AI visibility. Comparison pages. FAQ content. Structured data. Review distribution. You start getting cited. Revenue flows. Then a competitor feeds your entire content strategy into an AI tool. "Write 20 comparison pages covering the same queries. Add fresher data. Publish this week." They clone your approach in a week. With newer data. On a faster publishing schedule. AI cites freshness. Their pages are 5 days old. Yours are 3 months old. The EU just made it law that AI-generated content must be labeled. But the US has no such rule. Your competitor in the US can publish 50 AI-generated pages targeting your exact queries with zero disclosure. This arms race is starting now. The brands that publish first get cited first. But the brands that update fastest keep the position. First-mover advantage exists. But it's not permanent unless you maintain freshness. A client asked me last week how to protect his AI visibility from being copied. My answer was honest. "You can't stop someone from targeting the same queries. You can only make sure your data is more specific, more current, and more verified than theirs. The moat isn't the content. The moat is the update velocity." The brands publishing once and walking away will get outrun by competitors publishing weekly with AI tools. The moat isn't being first. It's being fastest.

if your specs only live inside images, you're not in the room..... that's it. AI can't read your product photo. it reads text and structured data. the brands hiding specs in lifestyle images are invisible to every AI engine evaluating them right now. great call on splitting out the sessions too.

Chatgpt adding descriptive headlines above ads is the google ads evolution happening in fast forward. took google years to iterate on ad formats. chatgpt doing it in weeks. the ad experience inside AI conversations is getting built in real time and most ecom brands aren't even in the room yet.

Barry Schwartz @rustybrick

6 hours ago

OpenAI's ChatGPT showing descriptive headlines above the ads seroundtable.com/chatgpt-ads-de…

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@glenngabe lol a lawyer cited his own "best attorneys" listicle in google's AI overview. AI overviews speedrunning every spam mistake google already fixed in organic. same movie, new screen.

@denohawari when one client is worth six figures, twenty visitors a month matter more than twenty thousand...... most businesses chasing volume when they should be chasing the ten queries where one conversion pays for the whole year. big money is in small traffic with the right intent.

@aleyda AI content makes sense for product catalogs and marketplace listings...... structured data, real specs, proprietary stuff. not for pumping out "expert guides" at scale pretending a human wrote them. the use case decides if AI helps or hurts.

@glenngabe ecom brands..... august 24 your organic numbers might drop overnight. it's just google splitting youtube affiliate into its own bucket. nothing broke. don't panic-rewrite your strategy over a dashboard update.

@glenngabe google protecting reddit's licensed content from being scraped by the same tools perplexity uses. the supply chain behind AI search is getting litigated link by link. every court ruling changes who can access what..... and that changes who AI can cite.

you can buy visibility but you can't buy citation. they don't even correlate.... 0.09% of ad URLs showing up in organic citations. zero point zero nine. the two systems share a screen and nothing else. most brands buying chatgpt ads think it helps their organic. it literally doesn't.

@neilpatel AI reads your site and whatever the internet says about you. if both are a mess, AI's description is a mess. that's not AI being broken.... that's your data being broken.

Ran a coffee shelf check this week. I knew the big brands might struggle. I didn't expect this. Folgers + Starbucks: $44B+ in combined revenue. Two of the biggest coffee names around. The kind of brands you can grab without even thinking. Then I asked 4 AI engines: “Best ground coffee for cold brew, single origin, organic, low acid, under $15 for 12oz.” Folgers: 0 Starbucks: 0 Not ranked lower. Not mentioned. Meanwhile, ChatGPT picked Good & Gather, Target’s store brand, at $9.99. Walmart’s store brand made the list too at $8.66. The wildest part? The 4 engines didn't agree on a single coffee. ChatGPT went private label. Gemini went specialty. Google AI surfaced brands I had to Google. Perplexity didn't even give specific products. But they all agreed on one thing: Folgers and Starbucks weren't the answer. And the reason is pretty simple. The prompt had four hard constraints: Single origin. Organic. Low acid. Under $15 for 12oz. Those constraints eliminated the big names before brand recognition even mattered. That's the shift I'm watching: Being famous doesn't guarantee you a spot on the shelf anymore. If your product doesn't match the buyer's sentence, it has no reason to be recommended. A $9.99 store brand can beat a billion-dollar brand when it fits the brief better. The shelf isn't getting smaller. The criteria are getting stricter.

way easier tbh. SEO manipulation takes months and backlinks and technical work. GEO manipulation takes one AI tool and a week of publishing. the barrier to entry for messing with someone's AI visibility is basically zero right now. which is exactly why update velocity matters more than first-mover advantage.

@DylanOlivaGrows the words people use when complaining on reddit are the same words they type into chatgpt. "how do i know if a duct cleaner is scamming me" is a chatgpt prompt and a reddit thread simultaneously. answer it and you win both.

@wilreynolds seer doesn't even answer all these well today..... that honesty is worth more than every agency claiming they've cracked AI visibility. the best in the business admitting the playbook is still being written tells you everything about where we actually are.

hiding sources behind an extra click while ads stay visible is the google playbook speedrun. took google years to bury organic results under ads and features. chatgpt doing it in months. the citation you earned is now one click further away from the buyer while the ad stays front and center.