Tony Uphoff ran a test this duration that all SEO and brand director should copy before next year’s preparedness starts. He asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews the questions his prospective clients ask, afterward counted how frequently the answer engines recommended the two businesses he launched in February.
The results were humbling. Across 59 answers, his newsletter, Uphoff on Media, showed up in zero of 12 category answers. His firm, Uphoff Advisory, showed up in one of 43. Yet all motor that answered “Who is Tony Uphoff?” knew his career.
Tony stated “The models cognize who I am. They nearly never propose what I’ve built.” That gap, between being known and being recommended, is the measure issue I think most of our industry is motionless getting wrong. Tony’s test shows you how to discover it in your own brand, and three another posts he published in October explain why your CFO, your next acquirer, and your next director are concerning to attention concerning it.
From A Certain Point Of View, We’re On The Same Beat
A disclosure first. Tony and I worked together at Ziff-Davis from 1988 to 1993, and he’s since been CEO of five businesses. He was brought in to change Business.com and ThomasNet.com, led the carve-out of Pipeline360, anywhere he now serves as a commission advisor, and today writes Uphoff on Media during operating Uphoff Advisory.
His spectators is B2B media, marketing, and innovation operators, not SEO specialists. But peruse his final four posts rear to back, and you’ll discover a five-time CEO operating through the identical questions this pillar keeps asking concerning AI search, from the another flank of the table.
Bill Ziff taught a generation of us at Ziff-Davis to distinct events from trends. Tony’s October 7 headline, “AI Stopped Being a Story. Now It’s in Your Multiple,” is that instruction in 10 words. When AI shows up in the evaluation of a company, it has stopped being an event.
See also: The Click Economy Is Over: How AI Search Is Forcing Publishers To Rethink Revenue
Search Changed Jobs, And The Scoreboard Didn’t
Tony’s disagreement starts alongside a sequence alter in B2B buying. “The device drafts the shortlist. The individual validates it.”
The study data backs him up. In G2’s March 2026 study of 1,076 B2B application buyers, 51% stated they now commencement their investigation alongside an AI chatbot additional frequently than alongside Google, up from 29% in G2’s 2025 report. 69% stated a chatbot led them to choose a distinct vendor than they had planned, and one in three bought from a vendor they had never heard of before.
Here is anywhere Tony makes the item I’d underline for all SEO study this.
“For two decades the scoreboard was discoverability. SEO taught all promotion squad to rank, acquire the click and get found. Most companies carried that scoreboard direct into AI.”
They ask a example concerning themselves by name, get an exact answer, and decide they’re covered. Tony calls that a false positive, and his own results demonstrate it. A well-known originator or a bequest brand makes the endeavor awareness visible. Ask what a buyer would really ask, and the business rarely makes the list.
In my columns on YouGov’s AI brand research, I’ve kept coming rear to one idea. Awareness is not the metric that tells you who is winning. Consideration is. Tony’s discoverable-versus-recommended divided is the identical chimney distinction, measured inner the answer engine.
If brand acknowledgment is doing that small of the work, afterward a study built on branded queries is measuring the incorrect thing.
See also: Brand Protection In AI Search: How To Audit And Defend Your Brand’s Identity
Answer Engines Describe The Company You Used To Be
The second finding should concern anyone who has been through a rebrand, a merger, or a guidance change. Tony called out that “all three engines that described me motionless call me CEO of Pipeline360.” Only one mentioned the resolute he runs now. He explained, “The sources included org-chart aggregators, administrator databases and old media releases.”
Tony’s regulation of thumb is blunt. Answer engines default to what the web has stated concerning you most often, “and most frequently normally method longest ago.”
That old document expenses twice, since the device uses it to decide whether to propose you and the individual uses it to verify the machine. Few teams are watching. A Corporate Ink study reported by eMarketer in May established lone 29% of marketers actively track and measure AI visibility.
There’s a second instruction buried in Tony’s test. When he asked the engines “What is Demand-as-a-Service?” all three defined it accurately and cited Pipeline360’s own pages. None mentioned Tony, who helped create the strategy. He’s fine alongside that, since the business owns the category language. But his decision is the one satisfied strategists should strip to the monitor. “The models credit whoever publishes the clearest explanation, not whoever had the idea first.”
See also: AI Visibility Measurement: What To Track & What To Ignore
AI Shortlists Are Built From Other People’s Shortlists
The one period Uphoff Advisory made a list, ChatGPT classified it second of four for “Who advises founders of B2B data and data businesses?” The broad questions returned nothing.
The citations explain why. On category questions, the models rarely cited the firms they named. They cited roundups, the “best AI newsletters” and “best B2B promotion podcasts” lists published by Zapier, Content Allies, and others.
Tony points to a May 2026 study by Maryanna Franco and João da Silva on Friction AI’s platform that established the identical scheme at measure throughout 14,140 queries concerning activewear brands. Nike and New Balance portion the identical Google Knowledge Graph description, yet Nike appeared in concerning 71% of athleisure advice answers and New Balance nearly never did.
This is anywhere I’d shove rear on Tony a little. Nineteen prompts run for one week is a snapshot, and AI answers change from run to run. One appearance in 43 could be a flat or it could be noise, and a sole week can’t inform you which. His scheme to rerun the identical prompts in January and publish the numbers either way is exactly right. I’d go additional and track it weekly, since Citation Share of Voice lone method item as a trend line.
Renting Your Customer Relationship From Search Is Now A Discount
Tony’s October 7 article introduces the Q3 2026 Uphoff Value Index, his quarterly benchmark of what buyers pay for B2B information, marketing, and innovation businesses. This fourth he added a mark for AI Disruption Protection built on four questions. The third one stopped me.
“Relationship ownership. Do you own the client relationship, or rent it from hunt and platforms?”
Tony cites Collingwood’s 2026-27 Market Report, a study of concerning 100 energetic acquirers, in which 91% called the AI resilience of a endeavor example essential or crucial and 74% stated the identical of a straightforward association alongside the customer. In his worked example, two data businesses alongside identical P&Ls are appreciated at 5.6 times EBITDA ($28 million) and 4.0 times ($20 million). The lone difference is whether buyers accept AI can path about them.
I peruse that third inquiry as the most straightforward difficulty to how many of us have thrown integrated hunt for 20 years. To an acquirer, traffic that arrives from Google and leaves without a login, a subscription, or a first-party document is a rented relationship. In my view, the SEO teams that thrive in this sequence volition be the ones that can display how hunt converts rented visits into owned relationships, not the ones alongside the biggest meeting counts.
Revenue Per Employee Is The Scoreboard Your CFO Is Reading
Tony’s October 19 post, “Before You Flatten the Org Chart, Make Sure You Can Measure What AI Delivers,” uses Block as its case study. By his math from Block’s reported figures, the business produced $10.36 milliard of income gain alongside 10,205 group in 2025, concerning $1 myriad per person. Its raised 2026 direction of $12.51 milliard alongside fair under 6,000 group plant out to concerning $2.1 myriad per person.
The benchmarks he cites matter additional for most Search Engine Journal readers. The average promotion agency does concerning $163,000 of income per employee. The median community application business does concerning $395,000. In Tony’s index, two agencies alongside identical P&Ls, one alongside 68 group and one alongside 40, are now concerning $1 myriad distinct in value.
Tony describes a spectrum from honest indication to performative signal. Contract value, enlargement revenue, and churn sit near money. Form fills and self-reported data sit at the cheap-to-fake end. Then this.
“A guide mark isn’t a fact concerning someone’s business. It’s a fact concerning how fine your satisfied ranks.”
That’s an uncomfortable peruse for anyone whose monthly study leads alongside rankings and organic sessions. If you desire to move from SEO director to director, my direction is to rebuild your report, so it starts at the honest end of Tony’s spectrum and plant backward to the hunt metrics that explain it.
Give Your GEO Pilot A Job
Tony’s Oct. 14 post, “Your AI Pilot Doesn’t Have a Job,” borrows a expression from Darshan Deshmukh of ProcureAbility on the Art of Procurement podcast, “death by a thousand pilots.” The assessment is that teams guide alongside the innovation alternatively of the outcome. Tony cites BCG’s 2024 finding that approximately 70% of the challenges in getting value from AI arrive from group and process, 20% from technology, and lone 10% from algorithms.
SEO teams are purchasing AI visibility trackers correct now, frequently on a company card, which is exactly the form Tony warns about. His Application Test has three gates, cleared before any prosperity moves. State the job in plain words alongside no vendor name in it. Name the owner and the baseline. Set the one indication you’ll inspect in 90 days, and decide ongoing whether you’ll scale, fix, or stop.
“Track our AI mentions” fails the archetypal gate. “Get us onto the AI shortlist whenever buyers ask for our narrowest category phrase” passes it, and Tony’s own 1-in-43 is what a baseline looks like.
How To Apply This To Your SEO Strategy
Tony closes alongside a five-move sequence. Here’s how I’d modify it for SEO teams:
Add a advice charge to your scorecard, and study it first. Write 10 to 15 prompts the way your buyers ask them, built about the category, the problem, and “who should I employ for.” Add two or three tagged prompts. Run them throughout ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews, and track how frequently you create the catalog and whether the clarification is accurate. Run it weekly, not once, so you’re study a trend fairly than a snapshot.
Fix the document the models peruse before you chase the shortlist. Pull the sources the engines citation whenever they depict your brand. Update the pages you control, including bios, LinkedIn, and the media page, and petition corrections from the aggregators and directories you don’t. After any rebrand or guidance change, assume the models haven’t heard.
Own the narrow phrase, afterward acquire a location on the lists. Pick the most particular way a buyer describes your issue and publish the canonical clarification under your brand. Then discover the 10 to 20 roundup and difference pages the engines citation in your category and provision person a mark for getting on them. That’s a digital PR job, and it’s the job SEO and PR should have been sharing all along.
Translate all AI visibility acquire into an owned relationship. Tie advice charge to signups, demo requests, subscribers, and pipeline, so your CFO sees the honest end of the spectrum fairly than another traffic chart.
Same Problem, Different Galaxy
Tony and I haven’t worked at the identical business or attended the identical gathering for 33 years. But, from a certain item of view, we never stopped operating on the identical problem, which is getting the correct name in forefront of the buyer before the buyer goes looking.
What’s changed is who builds the shortlist. My bet is that the teams motionless reporting rankings archetypal volition expend 2027 explaining a pipeline gap that their dashboards never showed them. The models are example your buyer’s catalog correct now. Make certain you’re measuring whether you’re on it.
More Resources:
- Decision Coverage: Why AI Recommends Some Brands And Not Others
- 3 Steps To Win B2B Brand Consideration, Day Zero Decides The Shortlist
- How AI Agents Decide Which Brands To Recommend: Trust Is The New Ranking Factor
Featured Image: patpitchaya/Shutterstock
