When AI builds an answer about your brand, it reaches into two completely different pools.
One is what it already knows, frozen months ago.
One is what it can fetch right now.
Most marketers are optimising for one and ignoring the other.
Quick CMO test:
Appeared consistently in trusted sources for 18-24 months? → probably in training data.
Story changed in the last 6 weeks? → need live retrieval to carry the new version. Memory is still on the old one.
Both can be true at once.
Two pools means two work plans, running in parallel.
Long-game: feed training data. Multi-year consistent signal across trusted sources.
Short-game: win live retrieval. Crawlable, structured, current.
Skip either one and you're running a half-strategy.
algorithm.agency/blog/where-…
What a CMO should do in the next 90 days:
1. Define your one-line entity
2. Audit your external footprint for contradictions
3. Fix structured data
4. Win third-party signals
5. Measure entity visibility, not page rankings
Full guide:
algorithm.agency/blog/how-ai…
The SA angle: South Africa's lower web signal density is actually a window.
Every new credible mention disproportionately shapes how the model sees your brand here.
83.4% of SA AI citations come from sources that only one engine trusts.
The first movers are already compounding.
What a CMO should do in the next 90 days:
1. Define your one-line entity
2. Audit your external footprint for contradictions
3. Fix structured data
4. Win third-party signals
5. Measure entity visibility, not page rankings
Full guide:
algorithm.agency/blog/how-ai…
The question has changed.
Old: "Is my page indexed?"
New: "Does the model know who we are and what we stand for?"
Google ranked pages.
AI cites entities.
A page at position 1 in Google can still be invisible in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude for the same query.
Three things follow from treating entities as the unit of work:
01. Mentions > rankings. Citations reward your entity, not your page.
02. Consistency > volume. 10 sources saying the same thing beat 50 contradicting each other.
03. Third-party sources do most of the work.
The CMO test:
If a journalist asked 5 independent people in your category to describe your brand in one sentence, would they say the same thing?
The closer those answers are, the stronger your entity.
AI runs that same comparison at scale across millions of sources.
AI doesn't index your brand. It builds a profile of it.
From every mention, every co-occurrence, across millions of sources.
If that profile is fuzzy or absent, you don't get cited.
The entity model that decides GEO visibility
We ran 2,737 SA prompts through ChatGPT, Perplexity & Claude. 46,315 domain-citations later: 83.4% of cited domains appeared on only ONE platform. There is no AI search. There is ChatGPT, Perplexity & Claude. They cite completely different SA sources. algorithm.agency/blog/we-mea…
Your brand ranks on Google.Does it exist in ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity?
Different question. Different answer.
Becoming more important by the month.
Watch this space. 👀
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