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  • Sep 15

JERK Report #31 AEO keeps changing. Not all the work does.

Three kinds of AEO work — fidgety, tech foundation, and buyer-arc. Most people are only doing one. Here's how each kind held up over seven months of tracked signals.

A client was frantic last week for a fast AEO win.

He felt left behind. He'd heard the buzz other people got with AEO tricks.

The methods he wanted worked three months ago, not today.

AEO is moving that fast.

We laughed about it tonight on the AEO Working Group. Yvette Brown, co-founder of XPROMOS  marketing agency and a Theia-certified AI trainer, reminded us that in the early days of e-commerce, everyone was rushing to test whether the buy-now button should be red or blue or green. They were testing button colors before they'd figured out who their audience was or what they were actually selling.

Most of AEO right now looks like that.   

If we read this week's JERK signals; here’s what they show.

Position

Reddit's share of ChatGPT citations sits at 0.52%. Six months ago it was #1 across every AI engine.

Pages refreshed in the last 30 days get cited 3.2x more than pages left alone for more than 90 days.

Cloudflare changed its defaults on September 15. Stricter three-category system. Easy to shut off your own site traffic without meaning to, including Googlebot in some setups.

AI engine traffic is shifting away from ChatGPT toward other LLMs.

Velocity

·        Reddit's decline inside Google's AI Overviews averages about 2% a week.

·        Engine market share is fragmenting away from ChatGPT. ChatGPT isn't losing business. The new business is going elsewhere.

·        Buyer journey fundamentals hold. Freshness. Real answers. Outside mentions. No reversals in seven months.

Acceleration

·        Reddit's Google AI Overviews decline took six weeks. Its ChatGPT decline, four days. Same platform. Faster collapse.

·        ChatGPT ad pricing went from $200K minimum in February to free self-serve by May. And Ipsos found 63% of US adults say ads in AI search reduce their trust. Buying placement doesn't just underperform. It damages the content around it.

·        Buyer-arc work has no acceleration to report. Seven months tracked; no changes in direction.

Jerk

·        The spec behind AI agent browsing got redesigned mid-rollout. Anyone who built for it had to rebuild. Agent traffic isn't in the dashboards yet because agents don't identify themselves. By the time the tools catch up, agents will already be a real share of who's reading your site.

Three kinds of AEO work.  

Fidgety work gets the press. Switch platforms. Install a new tracker. Chase whatever changed this week. Fragile, because what changed belongs to someone else.

Tech foundation is quiet. Site speed. Backlinks. Crawlable architecture. Structured data. Cloudflare set so it doesn't block the engines you want reading you. You probably have a web agency or SEO firm on this already. AEO raised the stakes. Ask them directly: are we current on tech foundation for the AI engines, not just Google?

Buyer-arc work is durable. Answer the question your buyer is actually asking, in their words, on their journey, not yours. Meet them at each stage: troubleshoot, give up, compare, decide.

Foundation and buyer-arc are both required. Content on a broken foundation doesn't get read. A perfect foundation with generic content doesn't get cited. Fidgety is sometimes worth doing when you spot something real. Never worth doing instead of the other two.

I went back through seven months of tracked signals to see how each kind actually held up.

These trends over time

Fidgety is fragile because it depends on someone else's infrastructure. Buyer-arc is durable because it depends on whether you actually understand the person buying from you. Tech foundation runs under both.

Five minute practice

Paste this into your favorite LLM:

Look at my website [URL] and my ICP is [describe your ideal customer]. Give my website an AEO readiness check, A through D. Then tell me the 80/20 — the single highest-leverage thing I should do this month to improve the grade.

The grade is a starting point, not a verdict.  

Want more, join the next workshop. Every attendee gets a full AEO Niche Report on their business, updated live in the call.

Increase Your AEO Odds Workshop →https://www.designrosetta.com/training-and-services

Best wishes,
Rose

Sources

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Check out the Jerk Report,

The JERK Report is a weekly signal read for small business owners. One signal. Four layers. A five-minute practice. Every Monday. From Rose Thun at Design Rosetta

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