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.
Ben Rees - 23 June 2026
Back in November, I proposed a hypothesis: branded AI visibility decays slowly, topical visibility decays fast, and most GEO advice optimises for the wrong one.
Eight weeks of tracking bjrees.com across Google Search and AI Mode (35 capture runs, 13 April - 15 June 2026) backs it up. Branded queries held at 100% → 100%. Topical "Scaling B2B Marketing" queries fell 75% → 46%. AEO-specific queries fell 38% → 17%, and 6 of the 12 non-branded queries behind that number never ranked at all.
The model, the per-query evidence, and the mechanism behind why branded and topical memory behave so differently are all in the infographic below.
What six months of measuring my own AEO visibility actually showed
I tracked my own AEO visibility for six months. FAQ schema and verbatim question matching didn't move it, and the reason isn't the content.
People - the True Heart of Decent Marketing
My talk at The Marketing Meetup's Cambridge chapter argued that AI visibility is a brand problem, not a content problem, backed by 5,095 real citation checks showing two published articles that never moved a single query they were written for.
Testing whether I should reuse old content
I fit a hierarchical Bayesian model to test whether retitling old content for AI citation works, and a robustness check collapsed the one clean result it found.
My AI visibility went from zero to 26% in six weeks. The one category still at zero is the one this post is about.
Six weeks after publishing a zero-appearance rate across every AI platform, most categories moved. The one still at zero is AI Search Visibility itself.