Hey folks,

I did something this week that stung a little. I ran the exact check I'm about to teach you, on my own newsletter.

I asked Perplexity, one of the AI answer engines your customers now use, a simple question: "best AI newsletters for business professionals who want to learn to use AI at work." It handed back a confident, tidy list. The Rundown. The Neuron. Superhuman. Ben's Bites. A few others. All good newsletters. All sitting in my own inbox.

Beyond the Buzz wasn't on it.

That's this whole issue. Being good isn't the same as being visible. People aren't Googling and scrolling ten blue links the way they used to. They ask ChatGPT or Gemini and take the three names it hands back. (One stat doing the rounds this week: most buyers now start their research in an AI tool, not Google.) If the AI doesn't say your name, you're not on the shortlist. You're invisible.

Good news: you can find out exactly where you stand in about 10 minutes, and a few concrete things genuinely move the needle. For your business, and yes, for my newsletter too. Let's dive in..

Search used to hand you a list and let you choose. AI answers do the choosing for you. Ask for the best project management tool and you get three or four names with reasons, not a page of links.

The game has gone from "rank on page one" to "get named in the answer."

Here's the uncomfortable bit. The AI's shortlist is built from what it has read about you and your competitors across the web. If a competitor wrote the clear, recent, quotable page and you didn't, they get named and you don't, even when your product is better.

Being good isn't enough anymore. Being legible to the AI is the new edge.

Look again at the list Perplexity read back to me. Every one of those newsletters has a clear, findable description, gets written about on other sites, and turns up in the roundups these models lean on. But where is my newsletter?

You don't need a fancy tool. You need a clean test, and it's three steps.

Step 1: Write down the questions your customers actually ask. Not your clever marketing phrases, the normal questions a real buyer types. Aim for about 10, in three flavours. Here's what they look like for, say, a small project management tool:

Use your customers' words, not your brochure's. If you sell accounting software to dentists, the question is "best accounting software for dental practices," not "cloud med-tech finance solutions."

Step 2: Ask each one in a clean window. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, and run every question in a fresh, logged-out (incognito) chat so your own history doesn't flatter the answer. Same question in all three, because a brand can be all over one and invisible on another.

Step 3: Write down three things for each. Were you named? Who got named instead? And which websites did it cite as sources? A simple table does it. Here's the real one I ran on Beyond the Buzz this week. Six subscriber questions, all on Perplexity, logged out:

Six questions, six times invisible. The one that stung most: I asked for "an AI newsletter with one practical tip a week," which is exactly what this newsletter is, and it handed back a competitor called One Useful Thing instead.

The names that keep recurring (The Rundown, The Neuron, Superhuman, Ruben Hassid) are my real competition.

And the sites it cited, those "top AI newsletters" roundups on datacamp, zapier, and the rest, are my to-do list. More on that in a second.

Your check just handed you a map: the competitors who keep showing up, and the websites the AI keeps citing. Here's how to use it.

Those cited sources from Step 3, the "best X" roundups and comparison sites, are where the model reads to build its shortlist. Getting listed or reviewed on even two of them does more than a year of your own blog posts.

Email the author, ask to be included, and hand them a sharper one-line description than your competitor's. You're not gaming the AI. You're getting into the sources it already reads.

Make a page on your own site whose title is the question, word for word ("Best [category] for [audience]"), and answer it in the first two lines, plainly. Then back it with the stuff AI loves to quote: real numbers, named specifics, and a short customer quote.

Pages with hard numbers get pulled into answers far more often, a direct quote lifts it further, and bullet points help (most cited pages use them).

The AI describes the version of you it can find. If your homepage, your LinkedIn, and that 2-year-old interview all say different things, it picks one, usually the oldest.

So line them up: the same sentence about what you do and who it's for, on your homepage, your LinkedIn, and your About page. Fix the stale stuff. Models tend to refresh their picture of you within a few days of reading something new and credible.

None of this is overnight. But it's the whole difference between being a great business the AI has never heard of, and being the name it reads back when your customer asks.

This is just SEO's next chapter, and it's early, which is exactly the opportunity. Most of your competitors haven't checked their AI visibility even once. The ones who start now get named while the answer is still being written. In a year this will be a job title. Right now it's a 10-minute head start. Run yours now.

Right now, open a fresh incognito ChatGPT and ask the single question your ideal customer would ask to find someone like you. Read the answer. Note who got named, and why.

That one query, honestly chosen, tells you in two minutes whether you have a problem. If your name isn't there, you've just found this quarter's most useful marketing project, and you're ahead of nearly everyone who hasn't looked.