I was so lucky to be at a Seth Godin event last Monday in NYC. It was wonderful, of course. It was about his new problem solving book, The Knot, which I recommend. 

The event was in a chocolatier‘s shop and as part of the event we were taught the proper way to eat chocolate. Not to bite. To place a small piece on the tongue, on the roof of your mouth and wait; let it melt and taste the layers slowly. I have been eating chocolate wrong my whole life and now like dark chocolate for the first time.  

But today’s report is to apply the highlights of that event to AEO; not just to chocolate.

The Knot is a problem you need to unwind. Seth talks about understanding problems versus situations; situations are outside your control and require acceptance; problems are things you can change; here are some examples.

The AEO Situation and things outside your control:

• How answers are determined and shown by AI engines 

• Each LLM is different, uses different sources and different weightings and biases

• Paid and free accounts can produce different results.

• Answers from APIs differ from chat provided answers

• Many AEO tools measure results through APIs or controlled queries rather than exactly reproducing what a buyer sees in chat. (like the parable of looking for lost keys under a light because you can see there even though you lost them down the street in the dark)

• The fact that the rules for AEO change weekly

• Some website platforms and configurations make AI discovery and crawling harder than others.

• Per Ipsos, 63% of US adults say ads in AI search reduce their trust.

• And many more, often fidgety as I described earlier.

The AEO problems you can address

• Having your website formatted and hosted to be easily read by LLMs

• Understanding who your buyer is and what questions and challenges they have

• Understanding your unique value

• Getting your business cited by third parties

• Taking action to establish your reputation

• And many more

Why we circle and get stuck

Godin describes how we go in circles because we want two incompatible things at once. Progress without risk. Change without loss. A new answer without letting go of the old scoreboard. He calls that hidden double-want an entanglement, and naming it allows you to start to solve it.[^1] He groups entanglements into

• Time-based: Sunk costs and premature optimization.

• Social: Phantom audiences and borrowed scorecards.

• Identity-based: Who you were or who you promised to become.

Three ways your business’ AEO stays stuck

1.  Sunk cost. You paid for a year of keyword and link work. The pages rank on Google. But they were built around the keywords you wanted to rank for, not necessarily the questions your buyers now ask AI. Changing them feels like throwing away work that succeeded at the job it was built to do.

   The two contradictory wants: to become more visible in AI, and to preserve pages built to win a different discovery game.

2. Borrowed scorecard. You look at traffic every Monday because that is how marketing has always been measured. Your Monday number can go down while your citations go up. The way you count won't tell you.

   The two contradictory wants: to move on AEO, and to have the board see the win in numbers they already trust. You need to ask your prospects how they found you to get you closer to ground truth than another visibility dashboard.

3. Identity. We do SEO well. We assume we were going to rank number one on Google for three keywords. An AI citation with no click does not move that KPI.  

   The two contradictory wants: a new answer, and to be the person who aces the old game.

Reading the Jerk Layers this week

AEO’s most accurate metric is asking people how they found you. API data in any of the commercial tools are an approximation. But if we think about AEO as a Knot, how we could think of the JERK layers this week qualitatively:

Position

Where are you now? Your strategy. Your visibility. And the percentage of prospects and customers who say AI helped them find you.

Velocity

Situations change weekly. The problems on your own site and in your AEO strategy move much more slowly.

Acceleration

Is your ability to learn and adapt getting faster or slower? Are AI-influenced prospects increasing or decreasing?

Jerk

The abrupt change comes when you stop reacting to every situation and redirect attention toward a problem you can actually solve. Snapping out of an entanglement can be the jerk.

Your five-minute practice this week

Make two columns on a piece of paper.

Left: the three AEO things you keep meaning to change but keep circling back to. Not the ones you already accept as impossible.

Right: for each, finish this sentence out loud. "I want to do this, but I also want ___." What lands in the blank is the entanglement.

Circle the one you are most ready to name and drop.

The chocolatier and Godin both taught a similar thing last Monday, slow down enough to notice what is already there; what is really there in the nuance.  

If you are curious to address the AEO problems, the next workshop is next week.

Best wishes,

Rose

Sources

[^1]: Seth Godin, The Knot: Problems Can Be Solved, foreword by Mel Robbins, published September 22, 2026. Entanglement, the double-want, and the mantra "name the baggage, drop the baggage, ship the work" are Godin's. https://seths.blog/theknot/  and https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9781668189139-the-knot