Research, analysis, and strategic commentary on marketing attribution, AI search visibility, and data-driven performance. Published by Arcalea practitioners with active client work in each area.
Arcalea tracked 40 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude to measure which M7 business schools appear in AI-generated answers to MBA applicant queries. The composite scores reveal a 9-point gap between the top three and the bottom four, plus a platform-level split no one saw coming.
73 prompts. 247 AI responses. 15 surrogacy agencies tracked. Arcalea's surrogacy AEO Index reveals a fundamental split: of 15 agencies in the index, exactly one wins on both Google and AI. Every other agency is winning on one channel and losing on the other.
62 prompts. 21 distributors. The largest private plumbing distributor in the US operates under 60-plus regional trade names, and AI engines have no idea who they are. Arcalea's commercial distribution index documents the entity fragmentation problem hiding inside the industry's market structure.
Six global practitioners. Twelve expert-backed predictions across digital infrastructure, data architecture, AI governance, agentic workflows, and ROI frameworks. Download the D2A2 2026 Insights Report to see where enterprise leaders are placing their bets.
The three disciplines that determine which brands get cited by AI engines versus which get ignored. A structural overview of how authority is built in the AI search era.
SEO always had two goals: the hard one leadership could see on a chart, and the soft one that shaped how the program was perceived. AEO collapsed the distance between them. This piece covers why the old way of managing that gap no longer works, and what to build instead.
A recent test of 16 AI assistants found that some ground their answers in a live web search and some do not, changing the actual content of the answer rather than only its sourcing. This piece covers what that means for GEO strategy and how to check where each platform your buyers use actually stands.
Cloudflare's new AI crawler defaults, effective September 15, treat mixed-use bots like Googlebot under the most restrictive rule that applies to them. For any brand trying to protect content from AI training while staying visible in Google Search, that is a setting worth checking before the deadline, not after.
New citation research shows that original data is rare in AI answers, but hugely over-weighted when it appears, and almost all of that advantage comes from one specific format. This piece breaks down what a citable benchmark actually requires and why most B2B brands are sitting on the raw material for one without knowing it.
Forrester surveyed nearly 18,000 B2B buyers and found 94% use AI tools to research vendors before ever talking to sales. This piece argues that AEO is the infrastructure for the sales interaction that had already occurred before your team knew the buyer existed.
Google searches are ending without a click at the fastest rate SparkToro has ever recorded. This piece breaks down what's driving it, why clicks-and-sessions reporting is measuring a shrinking surface, and the three additions that make an organic measurement framework accurate again
A study of 70 B2B companies found that 96% don't appear when buyers use AI to research vendors, and the gap has nothing to do with brand size or search rankings. Understanding why AI visibility works differently from SEO and what the 4% who do appear are doing deliberately is the starting point for any B2B marketing team that wants to be in the room where buying decisions are being formed.
Most AI visibility programs look rigorous on paper. They have prompt lists, platform coverage, and a monthly reporting cadence. What they don't have is a methodology sound enough to tell signal from noise, and in a system where ChatGPT replaces 74% of its cited sources every week, that gap compounds fast. This post breaks down exactly where standard tracking falls apart and what it takes to build measurement worth making decisions from.
Most PR programs are built around the wrong success metric. Coverage volume, domain authority, and general brand recognition don't tell you whether the sources you're landing in are the ones AI actually reaches for when someone in your category asks a buying question. They aren't. The source sets AI trusts are topic-specific, tier-driven, and largely invisible to strategies designed for a different search environment. This post explains what the research shows and how to realign your earned media investment around the sources that actually move AI citation rates.
The 61% drop in organic CTR from AI Overviews is real, but it's only half the story. Brands earning citations in those summaries are seeing higher click-through rates than before AI Overviews existed. The divide between cited and uncited brands has calcified, and which side you're on comes down to whether Google's AI systems can find, parse, and trust what you've published.
The internet has shifted from retrieval to reasoning. Search engines are no longer librarians surfacing ranked links: they are analysts synthesizing answers. Unoptimized brands are not demoted in AI-generated results. They are excluded entirely.
Weekly. Opinionated. For people who make decisions with data.