John Lovett

Editors Note: This post was originally published in August 2023, shortly after OpenAI announced GPTBot. Our core instinct in response to this update was: don't block your way out of visibility, and we still support that. However, things have changed significantly since then. We've added 2026 updates throughout this post where our thinking has been refined, corrected, or made more specific, and a full update at the end on our thinking.

What AI Thinks About Your Brand Is Already Written. We tested 5 hypotheses across 231,347+ LLM responses, 7 AI Platforms, and 52 days of live data from the 2026 Olympics to determine how AI decides who gets mentioned, who gets recommended, and why. AI Doesn’t “Find the Best Answer." It Completes the Most Familiar Story. We used the 2026 Winter Olympics as a live laboratory, a rare environment where results are unpredictable, news moves fast, and AI had to work in real time.

Conversational analytics is having its moment. With Google's Analytics MCP (Model Context Protocol), connecting your GA4 data to AI companions like Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini has become remarkably straightforward. Instead of navigating dashboards and building custom reports, you can simply ask "How many users visited from organic social last week?" and receive instant, accurate answers.