Tuesday, May 5

🧠 Neuroscience Says You're Saying the Wrong Things

Most messaging fails not because of bad writing, but because it ignores how buyers' brains make decisions.

In this live session, Grant Gooding of PROOF Positioning joins Paul Slack from Vende Digital to unpack 4 ways to communicate with the buying brain more effectively.

📅 May 20 | 12PM CST. Free to attend. Save Your Seat →

⚡️ Today’s Headlines ⚡️

🏷️ Instagram added AI Creator labels. The new account label is for creators who regularly use artificial intelligence tools to build their posts, in an attempt to increase transparency and facilitate the expanded use of AI in content.

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🗞️ Threads expanded trending topic summaries to more regions. The AI-generated summaries, which appear in the Explore element of the app, are now available in Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Brazil.

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🤩 TikTok is expanding Out of Phone campaigns. Thanks to a new partnership with Vistar Media, ad partners will soon be able to extend their TikTok ads campaigns to more than a million additional high-traffic placements in public viewing areas.

💡 Today’s Insight 💡

The 7 AEO tools you need right now

🗞 TL;DR - The explosion of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) tools is here, but most tools don’t directly improve AI visibility. Search Engine Land argues that AEO success is driven less by tooling and more by strategy, content quality, and authority signals.

💡 Insight - Many AEO tools promise to track rankings, citations, or visibility in AI platforms, but the reality is measurement is still fragmented and imperfect. No single tool provides a complete picture, and over-reliance on dashboards can create a false sense of control.

Here are the top 7 tools Search Engine Land recommends and how to use them:

1. AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc.) - Used intentionally, LLMs can be research and analysis tools in their own right to test prompts, understand the competitive landscape and content gaps, or audit topical coverage.

2. Profound - A purpose-built AEO intelligence tool that monitors how AI platforms (such as the ones above) discover, surface, and cite your brand and content.

3. Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner - Google Trends tracks the relative search interest for queries over time and geographies, while Keyword Planner provides search volume estimates and demand forecasting.

4. Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics (GA4) - GSC provides direct data on how your site performs in Google Search while GA4 tracks on-site behavior and referral traffic sources (which could be from AI-adjacent platforms).

5. AI Trust Signals - These focus on the credibility and trustworthiness signals that influence whether AI systems choose to cite a source, an emerging & underexplored dimension of AEO.

6. Ahrefs - A mature SEO platform with deep backlink analysis, content gap tooling, site auditing, and keyword research capabilities.

7. Roadway AI - An AI-native platform with a focus on scaling growth marketing activities, can help attribute AEO signals into revenue.

🙇 How Can I Help You This Week?

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