The Brief * The result: for a month, a paid AI visibility tracker ranked my consultancy first in its category. On the questions a buyer would ask without our name in them, AI engines named us in about one answer in nine, mostly on ChatGPT (27%, against Perplexity's 2%
A fabricated award on one web page was repeated as fact by three chatbots. Here is what AEO and GEO actually mean, what the visibility tools do and do not buy you, and a free way to find out what the engines say about your organisation.
The AI you were given finished near the bottom. 8 assistants, five comms briefs, 320 blind scores: the medal table, and how to run your own test.
The Brief * What happened: iOS 27 arrived on 14 September with Siri AI, an assistant built on Apple Intelligence that reads your mail, messages, notes, calendar and files and acts inside apps. On Monday I put it through 33 tests on an iPhone 16 Pro and a Mac, 29 of
AI systems are built on language, steered by language and increasingly speak on an organisation's behalf. That makes communication part of how the technology behaves, and hands comms a job nobody else in the building is trained for.
A lot of AI output feels generic, and one reason is that the model has no idea what your organisation has already said, approved or decided. Here is where a durable memory can live, ten practices that keep it trustworthy, and three things you can do today.
Hundreds of AI agents attacked Hugging Face without once asking a human for help. Ethan Mollick's response points at a future that needs exactly the skills comms people already have.
The problem is not that comms professionals are using AI badly. It is that most of them are using one layer of it and assuming that is all there is.
What is the communications function now for, and will communicators rebuild it before the answer is decided for them?
AI's leading voices are losing the communications war because they are fighting a publicity war instead. They are spending on the message and neglecting the fundamentals.
Ask a room of communications professionals what stops them getting value from AI and you tend to hear the same one or two answers: it makes things up, or the lawyers will not allow it. Both are real. Neither is the whole picture.
A little over a year ago, I began the Applied / Comms With AI newsletter began with a simple promise: to experiment, fail, learn, and share everything along the way. Twelve months, two dozen-plus experiments, tool tests and practitioner interviews later – as well as a couple of recent awards wins