Anything Engine Optimization The rolling record of the AI-search industry.

Accountability

What this record is made of

Every publication asks readers to trust its judgment. Almost none shows its working. These figures are counted from the published record when the site builds — not entered by hand, not rounded in our favour, and not excluding the ones we would rather were different.

239 items over 60 days · 4.0 a day · 47 distinct sources

01 Where it comes from

Concentration is the number to watch. Our founding memo claims the wire catches stories before or without the trade press; the honest reading of this table is that it does so less often than that claim implies.

SourceItemsShare
PPC Land3314%
Search Engine Roundtable3013%
Search Engine Journal3013%
Chat GPT Is Eating the World2812%
Search Engine Land219%
arXiv GEO135%
Profound research blog104%
BrightEdge Blog94%
The four largest trade outlets together supply 114 of 239 items (48%). A wire that mostly follows the trade press is an aggregator; moving this number down is an editorial goal, and publishing it is how it stays one.

02 What we flag against ourselves

A flag is a caveat we attach to our own item — that it rests on one source, that the study was published by a vendor with an interest, that the news is older than it looks. 91 of 239 items carry at least one (38%).

CaveatItems
single-source28
catch-up10
BrightEdge study8
Ahrefs study2
Similarweb study2
Fractl study2
vendor study2
wire analysis of published documentation2
Semrush study1
audit study1
documentation change bounded to Jul 23–24 UTC1
Google study1
Pillarbase study1
Writesonic study1
geoSurge study1
AOP-commissioned study1
Datos/SparkToro study1
vendor-published1
Search Signals Index1
content recency study1
RTB House study1
Peec AI study1
local AI search study1
Norly Research study1
Adthena study1
self-published analyst data1
single-brand self-study1
Promptwatch study1
rolling out to a subset of site owners1
wire analysis of Cloudflare's published posts1
wire analysis of the protocols' own published documentation, fetched 2026-08-301
wire analysis connecting two published measurements1
OpenAI-reported figure1
NewzDash analysis1
SISTRIX study1
Contentsquare study1
Profound study1
Comscore data1
Sensor Tower study1
Productrise study1
Ten Speed study1
Smarter Ecommerce study1
AI Overviews CTR study1
Flags are set at publication and never removed quietly.

03 Corrections

1 of 239 items carry an appended, dated correction. The standing log is at corrections.

04 Coverage and furniture

MeasureCountShare
Items answering a searchable question239100%
Items tagged to the record21891%
Subjects with a rolling record page23
Lanes in use9 of 9
Items with no entity tag are absent from the rolling record — a gap in our own filing, counted here rather than left for someone else to find.