Distribution is the next frontier: Measuring your AI visibility

Last week I made the audit changes I told you about, and promised you the numbers this week. The truth is, one week is not much time, so I am going to be careful about what I claim, and honest about what I cannot.

This issue does two things. First, a quick and honest look at what changed since I made the fixes. Then the bigger point: how I actually measure whether I am showing up inside AI answers, using free data I own, with real examples from my own site. Because I truly believe distribution is the next frontier, and you cannot own a channel you cannot measure.

What moved in a week

Honestly, nothing I can take credit for yet. Let me show you both sides.

Google did not really move. Impressions went up slightly in the last few days, but clicks are still very low, and my pages are still sitting around page two or three. Google also has not refreshed its indexing report since before I made the changes, so it has not even re-checked the pages I rewrote. It is too early to say anything real about Google, so I will not pretend otherwise.

The AI side went up. My Copilot citations are up by more than a quarter since last week. I would love to tell you that is the fixes working. But I have to be straight with you: the increase started on the same day I deployed the changes. Fixes like these take days or weeks to have any effect. Something that moves on the same day cannot be caused by what I did that morning. The citations were already climbing on their own. So the growth is real, but I cannot honestly connect it to the audit. Not yet at least.

So the real result of week one is smaller than the big jumps I have been used to, but valuable results nevertheless. Google is unreadable for now. The AI distribution channel is growing, but the timing tells me this jump was already happening before I touched anything. The one thing I can say for sure is that I could see all of it clearly enough to know what I am allowed to claim. That is the part actually worth talking about.

Distribution is the next frontier

Here is why that matters to me, and why I keep coming back to it.

For twenty years the game was to rank on Google and hope it sent you a visitor. That channel is slow, it is hard to read, and these days it often answers the question itself instead of sending anyone to you.

The channel that is growing for me works a bit differently. There, an AI assistant reads my page and uses it directly in its answer. I get cited inside the response itself. And the important part is that I can measure it, for free, with data I own. If you can see a channel clearly, you can grow it. If you cannot see it, all you can do is wait and hope.

That is the whole idea behind this newsletter. Sovereignty means owning your distribution. This week showed me that the AI channel is something you can actually own and watch, in a way Google never really allowed.

How I measure whether I show up in AI

The usual advice right now is to buy an AI visibility tool. These tools run a fixed list of prompts and guess how often your brand appears. They are fine, but you are paying for an estimate. Before you pay for a guess, use the real data you already have.

Bing Webmaster Tools has a free report called AI Performance. It shows you real citations from Copilot and its partners. Here is what it showed me about my own site, and how I read each part.

It shows the exact questions where I get cited. My biggest one is a version of "best developer marketing newsletters." On that question, close to 58 percent of everything the assistant quoted came from my site. More than half of that answer is me.

It shows clusters of related questions. Around that main question sits a whole family of similar ones, all about side projects for experienced and specialist people. On several of them I hold somewhere between a quarter and 40 percent of the sources. That tells me I own the whole topic, and that it is a real pattern I can lean against.

It labels each question by intent and topic. It tells me whether a question is commercial or just research, and what subject it belongs to. So I can see which of my citations are close to someone making a decision, and which are people just reading around. That is how I tell which numbers actually matter.

Two more free signals sit next to that report.

Google Search Console tells me whether I am even in the game: which of my pages are indexed, and which are stuck. If a page is not indexed, the engines that rely on the search index cannot cite it.

My server and CDN (personally I use Cloudflare) logs tell me which AI crawlers are visiting, and how often. That is the earliest signal of all. Usually, when you see AI crawlers hitting your CDN, you can expect to show up soon in one of the downstream channels.

How to read it without kidding yourself

Four simple questions turn that report into a decision.

Am I there at all? Either the AI assistant used my page for that answer, or it did not. The tricky part is that this is invisible. When your Google ranking drops, you can see it. When an AI quietly stops using your page, nothing tells you. You only find out if you go and look.

How much of the answer is me? Being cited once is only the start. What matters is how much of the answer actually comes from you. Being one link out of twenty is very different from being half the answer.

Which questions am I winning? The list of questions is a map of the demand you are really capturing. Find the one that brings you the most citations, and keep writing around it. Every time I have done that, my share of that answer has gone up.

Is it going up or down? One reading on one day means nothing. What matters is the trend over weeks. I care far more about the direction than the number on any single day.

How I actually got here

There was no trick to this. I wrote pages that answer a specific question better than the other options out there, in a format an assistant can easily quote, and I made sure the crawlers could reach them. Then I watched the report, saw which questions I was winning, and wrote more around them. The audit I shared last week is that whole process, step by step, and I kept it as a free checklist you can run on your own site.

→ The GEO/AEO Audit Checklist

If you do one thing this week, open your own Bing Webmaster AI Performance report. Most people running a site have never looked, and it is the easiest way to see where you actually stand.

What I am watching next

One week is not enough to conclude anything, so I am not going to pretend it is. I am leaving everything measuring for the next few weeks, and I will report back honestly, including whatever did not work. The two things I want to know: whether the changes push the AI numbers higher over time, and whether any of it finally moves Google. I hope that next week I will have better answers.

What I'm Thinking About This Week

Whether knowing your numbers now matters more than making the thing. Writing a good page is the easy part these days (mainly writing your own thoughts and then enhancing it with AI). Knowing which questions you win, by how much, and whether that is rising, might be what separates the people who own their distribution from the people who just rent it.

Reply to this email with one of:

• Have you ever opened Bing Webmaster's AI Performance report? If not, open it once this week and tell me the one question you are cited on most. It is free, and hardly anyone looks.

• Which of your distribution channels do you actually own, and which are you just renting?

• The one number about your own visibility you wish you could see but cannot.

P.S. The toolkit, in the order I would use it: Visibility Audit → GEO/AEO Audit Checklist → How to Get Cited by AI → SEO Strategy Playbook → Title & Meta Audit → Sovereign Idea Workflow → Business Model Canvas. All free.

P.P.S. Know someone who keeps pouring work into Google and getting less back every month? Forward this. The channel they are not watching might be the one already working. They can subscribe at thesovereigntechnologist.com.

That’s all for this week.

See you next Thursday.