resources and guides

Hear what the internet is saying

Practical guides, resources and news for marketers who want to grow. Understand your audience across social networks, find new leads and partnership opportunities, keep track of how AI describes your brand, and pick up tips to build your visibility along the way.

BrowseAI Visibility 10125 Playbooks10 In the news3 Listening 1012

AI Visibility 101·27 August 2026·7 min read

What is AI citation rate, and how do you measure it?

Being named in an AI answer and being cited as one of its sources are not the same thing, and the gap between the two is often bigger than dashboards showing only appearance rate let on.

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AI Visibility 101·6 min read

AI Max vs Performance Max: what changes on 1 September

From 1 September, Google starts auto-upgrading Search campaigns onto AI Max whether you opted in or not. Here's what changes, how AI Max differs from Performance Max, and what to check in your account first.

25 August 2026

Playbooks·6 min read

How to set up brand reputation monitoring

A reputation problem rarely starts as a crisis. It starts as a slightly worse week, a complaint that repeats, a competitor pulling ahead in the same conversation. Here's how to watch for that drift before it turns into a headline.

23 August 2026

AI Visibility 101·8 min read

How to rank on Gemini: what makes Google's grounding different

Gemini the chatbot and Google's AI Overview are not the same thing, even though people use "ranking on Gemini" to mean both. Here's the mechanism, and a real journey where Gemini recommended a brand outright.

21 August 2026

AI Visibility 101·9 min read

How to rank on ChatGPT: what gets a brand recommended

ChatGPT searches the web for some questions and answers the rest from training. The two modes don't recommend the same brands, and only one of them is a fix you can make this week.

19 August 2026

AI Visibility 101·8 min read

How AI watermarking works, and what it means if you write with AI

Since 2 August, most text Claude writes carries an invisible marker showing where it came from, and the company applied the rule everywhere, not just in the EU. Here's how AI watermarking actually works, and what changes if you draft marketing copy with it.

17 August 2026

Playbooks·8 min read

How to monitor competitor activity using social listening

Watching a competitor's website tells you what already shipped. Watching what people say about them tells you what's coming, what's working and what's making customers leave. Here's how to set that up and what to do with what it finds.

15 August 2026

AI Visibility 101·8 min read

How to optimise content for AI search engines

Getting crawled and getting cited are different problems. This is what to change in how you write and structure a page so an AI search engine can lift a fact from it, not just visit it.

13 August 2026

AI Visibility 101·6 min read

How to rank on Perplexity: what gets a brand cited

Perplexity doesn't behave like ChatGPT or Gemini: it runs a fresh search for every question and shows its sources inline. Here's what we've found gets a brand cited there, and a real example of it picking a rival instead.

11 August 2026

AI Visibility 101·7 min read

ChatGPT ads now skip the landing page

OpenAI just added an ad format that opens a conversation instead of a website, and licensed Yelp's reviews into the bargain. Neither change is about ranking or citations. Here's what actually changed, and what it means if you're not planning to buy ads at all.

9 August 2026

Playbooks·8 min read

Social listening for market research: what it can't replace

A survey tells you what people say when you ask. Social listening for market research shows you what they say when nobody did. Here's what that's good for, how to set a project up, and the honest limits worth knowing before you rely on it.

7 August 2026

AI Visibility 101·7 min read

What is LLM SEO? GEO and AEO by another name

LLM SEO, LLMO, GEO and AEO all describe the same underlying job: getting an AI assistant to name your brand in its answer. Here's why the industry ended up with four labels for one discipline, and what changes depending on which one you use.

5 August 2026

AI Visibility 101·7 min read

How to implement generative engine optimization: a step-by-step start

Knowing GEO matters and knowing what to do this week are different problems. Here is the order we'd work through it in, from a cold start to a repeatable weekly check, pulling together the crawlability, measurement and content pieces we've written about separately.

3 August 2026

AI Visibility 101·7 min read

How AI chatbots summarise long content: what that means for writing

Paste a long article into ChatGPT and ask for the gist, and the summary often nails the opening and the closing while flattening everything in between. That's not random. Here's the mechanism, attributed to the people who study it, and three things it changes about how you write.

1 August 2026

Playbooks·7 min read

How to find your first users through social listening

Word of mouth is real, but it's slow, and you can't plan a launch around it. Here's how to find your first users by watching the public conversation where they're already describing the problem you solve.

31 July 2026

AI Visibility 101·6 min read

AI search visibility factors: what actually earns you a citation

Most advice lists tactics without saying which ones matter most. Here are the AI search visibility factors we can actually point to evidence for, in the order we'd fix them.

29 July 2026

AI Visibility 101·7 min read

AEO vs GEO: what's actually different

AEO and GEO get used almost interchangeably, and some agencies now argue they're the same discipline wearing two names. Here's the one distinction that actually holds up, and a simple way to decide which to prioritise first.

27 July 2026

AI Visibility 101·8 min read

How are AI models trained? ChatGPT's training explained in plain English

Most people who use ChatGPT every day couldn't tell you how it actually got built. Here's the three-stage process in plain English, attributed to OpenAI's own account of it, and why the process matters if you're trying to get your brand mentioned by one of these models.

25 July 2026

Playbooks·7 min read

How to generate leads using social listening

Most social listening advice stops at brand monitoring. Here's the other half: the specific conversations worth watching for buying signals, and a simple weekly routine for turning them into warm outreach instead of cold pitches.

23 July 2026

AI Visibility 101·6 min read

How to run an AI search visibility audit: a step-by-step framework

Measuring is ongoing and improving is a to-do list. An audit is neither: it's a bounded, couple-of-hours exercise that tells you exactly where you stand right now, across every AI assistant that matters, so you have something concrete to act on.

21 July 2026

AI Visibility 101·7 min read

What is GEO? Generative engine optimisation, explained

GEO gets thrown around as a buzzword and a rebrand of SEO in the same breath. It's neither: it's a specific, named research problem with a real origin, a working definition, and a set of levers that genuinely differ from classic search optimisation. Here is where the term came from and what it means.

19 July 2026

AI Visibility 101·6 min read

Does your brand name affect AI search visibility?

You picked your name for the domain, the trademark search and the way it sounded in a pitch meeting. Nobody asked whether an AI assistant would know what it meant. It turns out that question matters more than most naming checklists account for.

14 July 2026

Listening 101·6 min read

How do social listening tools work? The pipeline behind the dashboard

You open a listening dashboard and see "sentiment up 8%" or "312 new mentions this week." Here's what actually happens between someone posting online and that number showing up: how social listening tools collect, clean, score and deliver the conversation.

14 July 2026

AI Visibility 101·6 min read

What is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)? Explained for marketers

RAG gets thrown around in AI-search conversations like everyone already knows what it means. Underneath the jargon it's a two-step process that decides which passage of text an AI assistant pulls into its answer, and that decision is one you can influence.

14 July 2026

AI Visibility 101·7 min read

What is AEO? Answer engine optimisation, explained for B2B teams

AEO gets used two different ways: the older discipline of winning a featured snippet, and the newer one of being the answer an AI assistant gives a B2B buyer. Here is where the term came from, how it overlaps with GEO, and what matters if you sell to other businesses.

13 July 2026

Playbooks·6 min read

Social listening for founders: why it matters before you have a marketing team

You're doing sales, product and support before breakfast, so a listening tool sounds like a nice-to-have for later. It isn't. Here's why social listening pays off earliest for founders specifically, and the five things worth watching from day one.

11 July 2026

AI Visibility 101·8 min read

How AI crawlers find and cite your brand

AI assistants don't read the web the way a human does. A separate fleet of bots crawls your site, a different process decides what to retrieve when someone asks a question, and only a fraction of what gets crawled ever makes it into an answer. Here is how the pipeline actually works, and what to fix first.

9 July 2026

AI Visibility 101·7 min read

How to measure AI search visibility: a step-by-step method

Knowing you should track appearance rate, share of AI voice, win rate and sentiment is the easy part. Here is the actual method: how many prompts to run, across which models, how often, and the mistakes that quietly wreck the numbers.

8 July 2026

Playbooks·7 min read

How to do social listening for free

You don't need a five-figure contract to know what people are saying about your brand. Here's exactly how to do social listening for free: the manual searches that cost nothing, where they fall short, and how a free tool tier closes the gap.

7 July 2026

AI Visibility 101·6 min read

How to improve your AI search visibility: a practical playbook

Measuring your AI search visibility tells you where you stand. This is what to do about it: the content, coverage and technical fixes that move whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini recommend you, not just mention you.

6 July 2026

AI Visibility 101·8 min read

GEO vs SEO: what actually changes

GEO gets described as SEO for AI, and that's close enough to be useless. Here is what genuinely changes when you go from optimising for a search results page to optimising for an AI assistant's answer, and what stays exactly the same.

5 July 2026

AI Visibility 101·8 min read

How AI buyers shop: inside 59 real AI buying journeys

We watched AI buyers shop one brand's category end to end: 59 conversations across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Grok, 293 prompts, 316 brands named. AI buyers do not behave like search visitors. They interrogate, they compare, and they pick a winner. Here is what that looks like, and the numbers that describe it.

3 July 2026

AI Visibility 101·8 min read

What is AI search visibility? A plain-English guide

When a buyer asks ChatGPT which tool to use, does your brand appear in the answer? AI search visibility is the practice of knowing, measuring and improving your brand's presence in AI-generated recommendations. Here is what it means, why it matters and how to start.

29 June 2026

In the news·15 min read

Which AI is winning the conversation? ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini and Cursor, compared

We pointed Babel42 at the public chatter about the five AI tools everyone is arguing over, across X, Bluesky, YouTube and Hacker News. Grok owns the raw volume, Cursor and Claude are the best-liked, Bluesky is hostile to nearly all of them, and what each tool is famous for splits along surprisingly clean lines.

16 June 2026

In the news·12 min read

What does the internet think of the UK's social media ban?

The UK announced an under-16s social media ban, and we listened to the conversation across X, Bluesky, YouTube, Instagram and Mastodon. The verdict was sceptical: negative posts outnumbered positive ones by roughly four to one, and on X the opposition was close to total.

15 June 2026

Playbooks·6 min read

How to grow your organic marketing with social listening

Generic growth advice says to post consistently and write content that resonates. Fine, but about what, and for whom? Here are five practical ways social listening answers the questions that advice skips: what to write, who to partner with, where you stand against competitors, and how to feed your search and AI visibility.

12 June 2026

In the news·12 min read

What does social media think of the SpaceX IPO?

We tracked the SpaceX IPO across X, Bluesky, Mastodon and Instagram in the build-up to listing. Overall negative sentiment hit 31%, narrowly beating positive, but the four platforms told four very different stories.

12 June 2026

Playbooks·8 min read

Finding new partners through the power of social listening

The best brand partners, creators and collaborators are already talking about your space. Here's a marketing playbook for finding them with social listening: search your niche, sort by reach, read the influence score, and build a shortlist worth pitching.

9 June 2026

Listening 101·7 min read

What is social listening? A plain-English guide for 2026

Social listening sounds like enterprise jargon, but the idea is simple: know what the internet is saying about the things you care about. Here's how it works: the platforms, the features and the workflow, and how to start for free.

28 May 2026

Playbooks

Playbooks·2 min read

A founder's guide to handling a reputation wobble

One bad thread won't sink you, but ignoring it might. A calm, five-step playbook for spotting, sizing and steering a reputation moment before it becomes a crisis.

15 May 2026