Why We Started AEO Sherpa

For twenty-five years, being found online meant one thing: rank in a list of ten blue links. The playbook was imperfect and often gamed, but it was stable enough to build businesses on.

That stability is gone. Google now answers a large share of searches with AI Overviews and is steering people into AI Mode, which it says has more than a billion monthly users. ChatGPT has a similar audience. Perplexity, Claude, and Copilot answer questions by reading the web and quoting a handful of sources. Each of them chooses those sources differently, and each changes how it chooses them almost every week.

For the people whose work depends on being found, that is disorienting. Marketers see traffic fall while impressions rise. Publishers watch their reporting summarized above their own links. Small businesses are told to "optimize for AI" by vendors who cannot say what that means.

What we will do

AEO Sherpa is a publication about that terrain. Our job is to keep careful notes on how AI search works and how it is changing, and to turn them into practical guidance.

• Report the changes. When Google, OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic, Microsoft, or the infrastructure companies behind them change how answers are built or cited, we will explain what changed, how we know, and who it affects.
• Read the research carefully. There is a flood of AI visibility studies, many of them published by companies that sell the tools to fix the problem they describe. We will say who did the study, how, and how far its findings travel.
• Write field guides that work. Plain, tested instructions for getting content found and cited, updated when the ground moves.

How we work

We link to primary sources. We put dates on everything, because in this field a six-month-old answer is often wrong. We disclose relationships, including that this site runs on Cloudflare's EmDash. When we get something wrong, we correct it at the top of the story. Our full editorial standards are public.

We also practice what we write about. This site is built to be read by people and machines: clean HTML, structured data, an open robots.txt, and an llms.txt file that lists every story.

Join us

If you are trying to keep up with AI search, the best way to follow along is The Sherpa Brief, a free weekly email. One email, what changed, why it matters, and what to do next.

The trail is being built while we walk it. Let's map it together.

Alex Brufsky, founder and editor