Field notes from the
AI search era.
Research, benchmarks, and playbooks from the team building BrandAxis. New writing every week.
Recent writing
17 articlesBuyers ask AI now: why brand visibility moved from pages to mentions
Search didn't die — it moved. Buyers ask ChatGPT and Perplexity instead of scrolling ten blue links. Here's the data behind the shift, and how to get your leadership to take it seriously.
Felix Norton How to run an AI visibility audit (and read the results)
You can't fix what you can't see. This is a step-by-step AI visibility audit — pick your models, build a prompt set, score yourself across the four layers, and turn the results into priorities. Free template included.
Felix Norton Discoverability: getting your brand into the sources AI reads
AI can't recommend a brand it never sees. Discoverability is layer one of AI Alignment — making sure models can crawl you, find you in the sources they trust, and read you in machine-friendly ways.
Felix Norton Clarity: making AI describe your brand accurately
Being found isn't enough if AI gets you wrong. Clarity is layer two of AI Alignment — building a clean brand entity so models describe what you do, who you serve, and who you compete with correctly.
Felix Norton Authority: how to become a brand AI cites and recommends
Once AI can find and understand you, the contest begins: of all the brands it could name, why you? Authority is layer three of AI Alignment — earning the mentions and citations that make models choose you.
Felix Norton Trust: earning AI's confidence so it recommends you
Being mentioned isn't being recommended. Trust is the top layer of AI Alignment — the sentiment, reviews, and consistency signals that decide whether AI puts you forward or quietly steers buyers elsewhere.
Felix Norton Your 90-day AI Alignment plan: KPIs, reporting, and what to track
The framework is only useful if you run it. Here's a 90-day plan to move across all four layers of AI Alignment, the KPIs to track, and how to report progress to leadership.
Felix Norton Is Cloudflare hiding your site from AI? How to check and fix it.
Cloudflare now blocks AI crawlers by default — including the ones that read your site for ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Here's the 60-second check and the fix.
Felix Norton What is llms.txt? The new AI-search standard, explained.
A plain-English guide to llms.txt — what it is, what's inside it, where it goes, and whether AI models actually read it. Plus the cleanest reason to ship one anyway.
Felix Norton The complete GEO playbook — what to do, what to skip, what to measure.
Most GEO guides are 4,000 words of formatting tips and four-phase frameworks. This is the sharper version: which moves actually move the metric, which ones don't, and what to track so you can tell the difference.
Felix Norton What is GEO? Generative Engine Optimization, explained.
Search is splitting in two. Classic SEO ranks your pages in Google. GEO ranks your brand in the answers AI models give. Here's what changes — and what to do about it.
Felix Norton How ChatGPT actually picks which brands to mention.
We ran 4,200 branded queries across GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, and Gemini 1.5. A clear pattern emerged.
Felix Norton The BrandAxis GEO Benchmark — Q1 2026.
Which 50 B2B SaaS brands are winning in AI answers right now? The top 10 surprised us — and so did the bottom 10.
Felix Norton Your AI hallucination crisis playbook.
ChatGPT invents a fake product. Gemini quotes a competitor's price. What to do in the first 24 hours — and what not to.
Felix Norton AI citations aren't backlinks. Here's what they are instead.
The classic SEO mental model breaks down fast. What actually makes an AI model cite you?
Felix Norton Build a weekly GEO reporting dashboard in 20 minutes.
The stack: BrandAxis + Looker Studio + a single Slack webhook. Step-by-step walkthrough.
Felix Norton Reddit is the cheat code for AI visibility.
Why AI models love Reddit citations — and how to show up there without being spammy.
Felix Norton Get the GEO briefing.
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