Research

Why brands need to market to AI agents

What Is Answer Engine Optimization? AEO, Explained

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the narrow discipline of making your content retrievable by AI models. What it covers, how it works, where it stops.

AI Brand Monitoring: What It Is, Tools, and What It Misses

AI brand monitoring tracks what ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity say about your brand. Here is how it works and what mention counts leave out.

Nvidia Is Hiring Someone to Market to Agents

Nvidia is hiring a Director of Agent Marketing, and the job description names the audience out loud. Versions of this role will spread until marketing to agents is simply called marketing.

What AI Believes About Your Brand

A synthesis of four research papers from the Unusual.ai research series—37,000+ survey questions against ChatGPT and Claude—and what they imply for established brands marketing into AI commerce.

The Complete Guide to AI Attribution

This playbook is for marketing, growth, and revenue operations teams who need to measure AI's effect on their pipeline. It assumes a world in which AI is actively shaping opinions across every channel you run, and increasingly making purchasing decisions directly on behalf of your buyers.

How Stable Is Share of Voice?

Share of voice and adjacent AI brand tracking metrics are built by running a fixed prompt set through a model and counting what comes back. In an experiment with 100 buyer-style CRM prompts, swapping a single meaning-preserving word per prompt moved a brand's share of voice by up to 16.7 percentage points and changed roughly a third of the vendors recommended in a typical answer. Only 16 of the 100 prompt pairs produced identical vendor sets across the two wordings. The implication is that prompt-set tracking metrics largely describe the specific prompts a vendor chose, not the underlying model behavior they claim to measure. AEO and GEO tools have organized around prompt-set tracking, and b

AI is a New Audience For Brands

Marketers are watching their website's referrals from AI models like ChatGPT grow. This makes it easy to think of AI models as an emerging channel. Unfortunately, this view of AI blinds marketing teams from the full impact of AI on their funnel. AI is much closer to a new audience for brands rather than a new channel.

AI Search is Already Dying

The Wall Street Journal published an article this week called "AI Is Rewriting the Old Rules of Google Search and SEO." You should read it. It reveals how perfectly confused the market is right now. The article opens with the claim that optimizing for "AI search" is "the next iteration of SEO." Then the author spends the next thousand words describing every way in which this new thing is massively, fundamentally different from SEO: different ranking factors, different results per user, different sources per platform, different outcomes month to month, and results that vary depending on who's asking, what they've asked before, and what the AI had for breakfast. At no point does the author say

Why GEO Isn't Enough; The Case for AI Brand Alignment

Dev Finley is a career brand strategist and brand marketing expert. In this guest article, he discusses the shortcomings of Generative Engine Optimization and picks AI Brand Alignment as the holistic solution brands need.

AthenaHQ vs Profound vs Unusual: What Each Tool Actually Does

What does an AI brand visibility tool give you that an AEO/GEO tool doesn't give you?

Every AEO Tracking Tool on the Market (All 33, With Funding and Pricing)

The complete list of AEO tracking tools: 33 trackers compared by funding and pricing, how they work, which one to pick, and what tracking can miss.