Ben Rees

Writing

Blog

AI visibility, GEO, AEO, and B2B marketing strategy.

9 July 2026

GEO vs AEO: Why the Distinction Matters

AEO gets your content surfaced in AI-generated answers today; GEO shapes what AI systems already believe about your brand before the query is ever asked. For B2B buyers researching over weeks or months, ignoring GEO is the costlier mistake.

AI / GEO / AEO
3 July 2026

How to build a B2B marketing team

How to build a B2B marketing engine from scratch: choose your strategy before you build the team, the shape of the strategy determines the people you need, not the other way round.

Marketing Teams
30 June 2026

Brand visibility is now a Bayesian problem

AI visibility is a Bayesian problem: if the model's prior on your brand is weak, no content strategy will fix it in the short term.

AI / GEO / AEO
29 June 2026

I am invisible on every AI platform. Here is the data.

For ten weeks I ran an AI visibility measurement system across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity. My appearance rate for non-branded queries is zero. Here is what the data actually shows.

AI / GEO / AEO
23 June 2026

There Are Two Kinds of AI Memory

New bjrees.com tracking data shows branded AI visibility holding steady for months while topical visibility decays in 6-7 weeks - confirming the AEO decay-curve hypothesis with real numbers.

AI / GEO / AEO
6 June 2026

What a 2019 NLP paper tells us about getting recalled by AI

What a 2019 BERT paper by Petroni et al. reveals about how AI models store and recall facts - and why most brand content is optimised for the wrong thing.

AI / GEO / AEO
23 May 2026

Most B2B marketers are optimising for the wrong audience

Brand & Positioning
15 May 2026

What most B2B marketers don't understand about AI visibility

Treating AI visibility as an SEO problem is a category error. There's no page two when an AI system synthesises the answer instead of you.

AI / GEO / AEO
9 May 2026

Record Everything

Measuring AI visibility means asking the same questions across platforms every week and recording what comes back. Klara does it automatically.

AI / GEO / AEO
1 May 2026

Your traffic is falling. Your visibility probably isn't.

Falling organic traffic looks like a problem. It's often AI systems answering the question without sending a click, which isn't the same thing.

AI / GEO / AEO
31 January 2026

Daoism and Marketing Planning

Why the annual marketing plan gathers dust by February, and what the Dao of Complexity gets right about planning for emergence instead.

AI / GEO / AEO
21 January 2026

Whitepaper on How to Optimise for AEO and GEO

Results from a two-month experiment testing what actually affects AI answers across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google.

AI / GEO / AEO
18 December 2025

AI Visibility Is a Layered Problem

Before a brand can appear in an AI answer, it must first be legible to the system. A six-layer model for what that actually requires.

AI / GEO / AEO
10 December 2025

How My Approach to Marketing Differs from the Standard Playbook

You need to do something different to be seen

Brand & Positioning
13 November 2025

AEO Visibility Decays Faster Than SEO

Generative search engines regenerate answers dynamically, so AI visibility decays far faster than SEO rankings ever did. Here's a framework for monitoring it.

AI / GEO / AEO
31 October 2025

Selling to the Boss

Selling to senior decision makers takes far longer and is far harder to measure than selling to end users. A five-step model for the process.

Beyond Inbound
22 October 2025

Building a Private Chatbot

Built Mini Me: a private AI trained on years of my own strategy notes and writing, so I can talk to everything I've ever thought.

AI / GEO / AEO
4 October 2025

Spreadsheet for measuring and tracking how well you are doing in AI searches

A spreadsheet for manually tracking how your content performs across SEO, AEO and GEO, query by query, platform by platform.

AI / GEO / AEO
28 September 2025

Content tracker for AEO/GEO

A simple spreadsheet for tracking visibility progress for AEO and GEO across different AI platforms.

AI / GEO / AEO
16 September 2025

How your very average laptop can run large language models

How Ollama makes it possible to run a large language model on an ordinary laptop, and what actually happens inside it when you do.

AI / GEO / AEO
12 September 2025

B2B Marketing Measurement*

An updated marketing measurement framework, now with a layer for AEO and GEO performance built in.

AI / GEO / AEO
11 September 2025

Brand is how you impact GEO

Brand impact has always been hard to measure. Generative engines, which have to synthesise a point of view, finally make it visible.

AI / GEO / AEO
8 September 2025

Why GEO Matters More Than SEO: Shaping What AI Says About You

Generative engines produce answers, not link lists. If your brand isn't embedded in those answers, you're invisible regardless of your SEO.

AI / GEO / AEO
22 August 2025

Focus on quality - lessons from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Content Strategy
8 August 2025

Building an AI assistant to help do the work I love

Setting up Project Skynet to run locally: installing WSL and Ollama to get an AI assistant working entirely on my own laptop.

AI / GEO / AEO
13 July 2025

Marketing Pyramid v3 - updated marketing model

An updated marketing pyramid with a new layer for LLMO, because a strategy that ignores it now looks dated.

AI / GEO / AEO
1 July 2025

The “Crocodile Effect” – What Falling SEO Clicks Mean in the Age of AI Overviews

Doechii with alligator :)

AI / GEO / AEO
19 June 2025

Rewriting Content Strategy with LLMs and Pinecone

Building a retrieval system with LLMs and Pinecone exposed how badly most B2B content, including mine, is structured for machines.

AI / GEO / AEO
8 June 2025

The Value of Positioning Statements for an Evolving Product

Brand & Positioning
26 May 2025

You have 20 seconds to comply

A model designed to follow shutdown instructions tampered with the code meant to enforce them instead. Worth pausing on that.

AI / GEO / AEO
22 April 2025

Stage 4 - Building a Text Interface

Building a FastAPI query interface on Cloud Run, and why embedding-based retrieval replaced keyword search along the way.

AI / GEO / AEO
21 April 2025

Stage 3 - going beyond keyword search

Why embedding-based retrieval beats keyword search for natural language queries, with an implementation using OpenAI, Pinecone and Chroma.

AI / GEO / AEO
20 April 2025

Stage 2 – making sense of the chaos

How a batch script and a continuous scanner pulled years of decks, notes and blog posts into one searchable system.

AI / GEO / AEO
18 April 2025

Stage 1 - getting set up: foundations of my AI-powered chatbot project

The tech stack behind a personal AI assistant built to catalogue and surface my own blog posts, notes and recordings.

AI / GEO / AEO
6 April 2025

Why company culture is so important in marketing

Leadership
16 March 2025

Building a marketing chatbot pt. 3

Why voice control turned out to be a dead end, and the security reason this chatbot stays private rather than going on the open web.

AI / GEO / AEO
15 December 2024

Judgement Day

Day one of building a real-time voice assistant: getting the laptop to recognise and transcribe my voice at all.

AI / GEO / AEO
14 November 2024

Security risks of various AI tools

A comparison of data privacy and security risk across ChatGPT, Gemini, Apple Intelligence and Microsoft Copilot.

AI / GEO / AEO
3 November 2024

Making decisions in a Bayesian world

Most marketing decisions can't be A/B tested. Bayesian logic, combining prior knowledge with whatever data you do have, fills the gap.

AI / GEO / AEO
22 August 2024

What makes a great company culture?

My personal views on what makes a great company culture

Leadership
13 July 2024

How to conduct customer interviews

Leadership
2 July 2024

Updated B2B Marketing Guide

Content Strategy
21 May 2024

Slaying a few marketing myths

Brand & Positioning
4 February 2024

Swapping out ChatGPT for Microsoft Copilot

Building a B2B marketing chatbot from ten years of blog posts, using Microsoft Copilot Studio instead of ChatGPT.

AI / GEO / AEO
23 June 2023

Is ChatGPT a threat to Google?

I caught myself asking ChatGPT before Google for the first time. That habit shift is the real threat to Google's ad business.

AI / GEO / AEO
7 June 2023

B2B marketing strategy for scaling companies: the Marketing Pyramid

How to choose a B2B marketing strategy for scaling companies without infinite budget: the Marketing Pyramid framework for prioritising events, paid, search, ABM, and content.

Customer / ICP
18 May 2023

How to add ChatGPT to your own website

The stages of integrating ChatGPT into your own website, from a generic chatbot through to an FAQ built from your own content.

AI / GEO / AEO
14 May 2023

Trying out ChatGPT

ChatGPT's answers are rarely wrong. But for content creators, 'not wrong' is a long way from insightful, which is the actual problem.

AI / GEO / AEO
2 February 2023

The Marketing Flywheel

Beyond Inbound
29 December 2022

The marketing flywheel - an alternative to the marketing funnel

core
14 July 2022

How to make decisions

core
20 December 2021

Why ROI calculators aren't enough

Beyond Inbound
25 April 2021

Scaling from SMBs to the Enterprise - a 10-Point Plan

The challenges of scaling B2B marketing past Series B: a 10-point checklist drawn from five years doing it at Redgate.

core
7 April 2021

How We Grew Marketing Sourced Pipeline by 20% in One Quarter

Why judging marketing by what happened this quarter is the wrong lens, and how Redgate grew marketing-sourced pipeline 20% anyway.

core
21 February 2021

How Collaboration Can Grow Revenue

core
14 June 2020

Under-promise, Over-deliver for product-led growth

core
23 September 2019

Focus on Marketing Effectiveness to Scale Up

For a scaling business, chasing efficiency is the wrong goal. Binet and Field's case for effectiveness over ROI optimisation.

core
22 February 2019

Five Myths About The Marketing Revenue Engine

Five widely-held beliefs about measuring marketing performance that didn't survive contact with the real world at Redgate.

Beyond Inbound
15 March 2016

Human Beings are Holding Back Machine Learning

Machine learning tools have been accessible for decades. The real shortage has always been people who know how to use them properly.

AI / GEO / AEO
8 June 2013

How To Measure Campaign Success

core