AIVO Journal

The Tour Operator Is Being Rehabilitated

For two decades, the travel industry wrote them off. The AI layer is bringing them back. We ran 148 agentic shopping sessions across ten of the largest UK-facing travel platforms — Booking.com, Expedia, Trip.com, TUI, Agoda, Hopper, Jet2, Trivago, Skyscanner, and Tripadvisor — on ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. 99

The Cannes AI Playbook Stops at the Wrong Metric

AIVO Standard - Working Note Next week at Cannes, Profound and VaynerX will launch The CMO's Guide to GEO/AEO - a report grounded in Profound's proprietary data on AI answer behaviour, platform volatility, and brand visibility across the major generative engines. It will be widely read. It

The Atlantic just exposed “Sloptimization.”

We published the math behind why it’s backfiring. The Atlantic just exposed “Sloptimization.” We published the math behind why it’s backfiring. On June 10th, Will Oremus wrote a brilliant piece in The Atlantic exposing “Sloptimization” — the frantic corporate race to flood the web with programmatic listicles and engineered

Stop producing content for LLMs. You are damaging your brand.

AIVO Standard — Working Note The AI visibility industry has a growth problem. More content. More citations. More prompts engineered to surface your brand when someone asks a general question. The logic is simple: if the model knows you exist, it will recommend you. That logic is wrong. And the evidence

Search Marries Content. The Babies Aren't Being Delivered.

Three DXP deals in sixty days have wired AI visibility into the content stack. What none of them have wired in is whether brands are actually being chosen. In April, Adobe paid $1.9 billion for Semrush. On June 9, Sitecore acquired Scrunch for $225 million. On June 10 — less

The Selection Layer Is Missing From the Agentic Commerce Stack

Kendra Barnett's recent guide in Ad Age to the new agentic protocols is the clearest map yet of what's been built over the last eighteen months. MCP at the infrastructure layer. A2A for agent-to-agent communication. AdCP and ARTF for media buying. ACP, UCP, AP2,

Two Surfaces, Two Measurements: Navigating the Fragmentation of AI Commerce

The commercial reality of digital commerce is splitting cleanly down the middle. For brands, retailers, and digital platforms tracking their visibility in the AI ecosystem, this fragmentation introduces an immediate risk: you can win decisively on one AI surface and lose completely on another. If your enterprise insights team is

The Agentic Shelf: Measuring Autonomous AI Shopping Journeys

Executive Summary A new commerce surface is forming. We call it the Agentic Shelf: the surface on which autonomous AI buyers (such as frontier-model shopping agents, retailer-owned assistants, and third-party orchestration tools) select products on a consumer's behalf with little or no human intervention. Within

Expedia processed $119.6 billion in gross bookings in 2025.

Around 415 million room nights. Roughly 720 million site visits. How much of that infrastructure is now being consumed by AI agents that never book? A property detail page on Expedia runs to several hundred kilobytes of rendered HTML. For a human, that resolves into a price, a star rating,

AI isn’t ignoring TikTok. It’s colonising it from the inside.

Gen Z, the AIVO Paradox, and the cross-surface measurement layer that almost no brand has instrumented. A question keeps coming up in CMO conversations. Is AI ignoring the shopping potential of TikTok, particularly for Gen Z? The framing inverts under current data. AI is not ignoring TikTok. AI is

Why Freshdesk Wins When Buyers Don't Name a Vendor (And What That Says About AI Recommendations)

Run an experiment. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity. Describe yourself as a mid-sized B2B SaaS company looking for customer service software with omnichannel case management and AI-powered routing. Ask for a specific product recommendation, not just a category. You'd expect Salesforce. They are the canonical brand

Present, Then Displaced

A shopper asks ChatGPT which serum to buy. She asks Gemini for a comparison. She asks Perplexity to settle it. By the time she reaches the retailer, the decision is already made, inside a model she cannot see, against competitors she did not choose to be ranked against. We measured

Being a household name will not save you from a procurement agent

Enterprise procurement is changing faster than most Fortune 500 companies have registered. The sophisticated buyers who used to rely on brand reputation, relationship history, and category familiarity to build their shortlists are deploying AI agents to do that work. Those agents do not have brand loyalty. They do not recognise

Stop Demolishing the Block. The AI Legibility Fix Is Smaller Than You Think.

Every AI readiness programme in the market is scoped as if the entire building needs to come down. The data says otherwise. The problem is concentrated, the fix is surgical, and the brands that understand this will outperform the ones running full transformations. There is a pattern emerging in how

Memorial Day Musings

Something is shifting in how CEOs are thinking about AI and commerce. Not the AI productivity conversation. Not the chatbot conversation. Something quieter and more consequential. In the last few weeks I have heard the same instinct from founders and executives across different categories and geographies. The sense that the

The Platform Trap, Again

Reddit accounts for 46.7% of Perplexity's commercial query citations. Most brands have no idea what that means for their AI positioning. Tim de Rosen | CEO, AIVO, Inc. | May 2026 In 2014, Facebook changed its algorithm. Organic reach for brand pages collapsed from around 16% to under 2%

Google updated its spam policy yesterday. Every SEO newsletter in your inbox covered it.

Here's what none of them told you. The update covers Google Search. AI Overviews. AI Mode. One ecosystem, one policy, one surface. ChatGPT. Perplexity. Copilot. Gemini standalone. Claude. No equivalent policy exists on any of them. No enforcement mechanism. No guidance. No rules. Which means the brands celebrating

ChatGPT started serving ads

Most of the coverage has focused on what that means for OpenAI's revenue model. That's the wrong question. The right questions are: When a consumer asks ChatGPT which product to buy — and a sponsored placement appears alongside the answer — does the consumer know the difference between

We've named the category

Agentic Brand Control. For two years, the AI marketing conversation has been dominated by one question: does my brand appear in AI outputs? That's the wrong question. The right question is: does my brand survive to the recommendation? These are not the same thing. Our initial testing cohort

We've run over 12,000 AI buying sequences across travel, beauty, CPG, and financial services.

The pattern is consistent enough that I'll stake a public position on it. Ariane Gorin just told investors AEO is Expedia's fastest-growing channel. I'll say what nobody on that earnings call said: That's exactly the wrong thing to be winning. AEO

The SEO vs AEO vs GEO debate ran its course. The argument is over.

They are the same thing. Different names for the same objective: optimise a brand's presence in an output. Whether that output is a search result, an AI citation, or a generative summary, the metric is the same. Did the brand appear? Appearance is not selection. Agentic Brand Control

Adobe completed its $1.9 billion acquisition of Semrush twelve days ago

Semrush sells AI visibility. It is now Adobe's answer to the question of how brands show up in AI-generated answers. We ran it through an AI buying journey this morning. Generic presence score: 0. When a buyer opens ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity and asks which tool to

PepsiCo just launched a prebiotic cola to compete with OLIPOP PBC and poppi.

We ran it through six AI buying journeys across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. In four of six, the brand was displaced at Turn 1. The AI formed a competitor preference before Pepsi's product was ever seriously considered. By the time the consumer reached the purchase handoff, Olipop or

Brands getting traction on AI search optimization first evaluated the visibility dashboards

They're not unsophisticated buyers. They understood the category, ran the tools, and found the same gap every time. Visibility dashboards tell you where your brand appears across AI platforms. Share of voice, mention rate, citation frequency. The metrics are real and they are measurable. What they can'

What we built is not an AI visibility product

The more precise description is this: An end-to-end LLM evidence supply chain. Meridian runs structured buying sequences across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Anchored probes, generic probes, four-turn consumer conversations, eight-turn agentic simulations. It identifies the exact turn at which a brand is displaced, which competitor was