AEO Tracking Tools and Top (Human) Players

In this edition: hot takes from a few experts in the field (that I agree with).

This is Q&AI, our blog series aimed at keeping you in the know on updates in the rapidly evolving world of AI. Sometimes, these will be quick updates on new developments in the field. Sometimes, they’ll be tips on tactics, features, or functionality. 

If you haven’t met me yet, hi: I’m Jen Taylor, CI’s Director of AI Strategy & Implementation, and your (very human) AI BFF. AI is moving at the speed of light, so I’m here to let you know what matters most now. 

Q: Wow, I just ran my company name through [insert tool that lets you see how you show up in AI chatbots/overviews]! Are these results legit? 

A: I would suggest approaching these with a degree of skepticism! I get it, there are a lot of questions about what AI means for organic search, and how we can understand (and optimize!) what new AI search tools say about our organizations. Here’s a LinkedIn post from Christopher Penn (who is well regarded in AI/Marketing circles) on why knowing what LLMs are saying about your brand in their chats isn’t possible.

Some highlights:

There isn’t a single AI vendor of large language models that shares this data publicly, and therefore there are zero reliable sources of this data.

Two reasons why. First: privacy. While we know that nothing in the cloud is ever truly private (the cloud is just someone else’s computer), most AI vendors (especially paid tool vendors) have privacy policies in place that prevent the sharing of your data outside that vendor.

Second: money. No AI vendor, desperate for training data, is going to share the solid gold that is the interactions of users with their models. That’s reinforcement learning gold, and no one in their right mind is going to share their crown jewels.

Q: Who are the actual individual humans that are the biggest players in the AI space right now? 

A: The Artificial Intelligence podcast gave a very comprehensive overview of the 5 leaders of the 5 main AI houses. This is Paul’s (host of the show) perspective, but I’m aligned with it. In the segment he was fan-girling over Demis from Google and sees him/his work at Google as hope for the future of AI.

• Anthropic: Dario Amadei; came from Open Ai, physicist turned AI safety researcher and entrepreneur.
• OpenAI: Sam Altman; capitalist through and through; entrepreneur, investor, co-founded OpenAI with Elon Musk as a counterbalance to the perception that Google can’t be trusted to Shepherd AGI into the world.
• Grok: Elon Musk; richest person in the world, entrepreneur, obviously one of the great minds and venture entrepreneurs of our generations, but his motives are unclear, especially with XAI and why he’s pursuing AGI.
• Meta: Mark Zuckerberg; third richest person in the world, made all his money selling ads on top of social networks. His motivations, while they may be beyond this, have largely been to generate money by engaging people and keeping them on his platforms.
• Google: Demis Hassabis; a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who built DeepMind to solve intelligence and then solve everything else. Since he was 13 as a child prodigy, he’s been pursuing the biggest mysteries of the universe.

talk to you soon,
Jen

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