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The world is changing so quickly with tech and AI. It's hard to believe how much innovation is happening across every industry. Another product launch, another model, another superior agent I'm invited to talk to and hand over all my information to.

I'm getting this question from clients almost weekly now, and from founders it's some version of: how do I start showing up in ChatGPT? It's quite a change from how I've always thought about SEO. Ranking well on Google doesn't cover you anymore. Claude and Perplexity sit on a different index entirely, and they reward different things. Are you as confused as I am?

So I decided to sit down with two former Googlers. I was blown away by what Rushana and David from BrandViz were able to share. We went through what's actually changed, what gets a brand recommended, where most companies are wasting their effort, and the five things you'd do first if you were starting from zero. There's nothing like sitting with people who know a subject that well and are so passionate about it.

I hope you get as much from it as I did and that it starts you planning for the next frontier of search.

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

Your next customer may have read about you, compared you with two competitors and made up their mind in a conversation with an AI before they ever land on your website. That's the shift, and it's happened quickly.

Rushana and David took me through what the models are actually reading, and where brands are wasting their time. Two that surprised me: the llms.txt file everyone's been dutifully creating is ignored by almost every model right now, and the content AI most likes to quote is content that reads as though AI wrote it.

Rushana's framing is the one that stuck. Think of AI as a sales rep talking to your customers long before you meet them, and for most brands that rep is working from incomplete notes.

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I grew up in the nineties loving the mall: Aéropostale spelled across my chest in letters three inches tall, Hollister smelling of a cologne you could find from the escalator, and everything I wanted under one roof with a parking lot. Thrifting was never on my radar. Then one Sunday at the San Telmo market in Buenos Aires I came home with six hand-painted plates, blue birds on a cream glaze, one of them chipped, and the feeling lasted the whole afternoon in a way that had very little to do with plates.

I'm in large company. Roughly one dollar in every eight Americans spent on clothing last year went to something secondhand. The usual explanations are social media and conscience, and both are partly right, but neither accounts for a TikToker who wasn't engaged paying $25 at Goodwill for a $6,200 beaded gown and announcing she'd found her wedding dress.

The rush I felt over those plates has a name in neuroscience, and the more I read about it, the harder it became to tell the flea-market stall apart from the Shein app on my phone.

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I grew up in Córdoba, where the earth is a violent orange, the sky is an almost impossible blue, and none of it apologises for existing. Colour there was never a design decision, just the air. Then came years of moving through cities and countries, including Copenhagen, which does restraint better than almost anywhere, though for a different reason than most people assume.

What spread from there into fashion, interiors, film and branding is a flattened copy of the Scandinavian model, with the quiet kept and the conviction left behind. The same white walls and poured concrete now pass for luxury from Miami penthouses to Sydney apartments. Wardrobes have settled into oat, sand, slate and bone. Cinema used to tell you what world you were in before anyone spoke, with Almodóvar's saturated reds and Fincher's washed-out greens.

Now a $200 million blockbuster looks like the one released three months before it, slightly green in the shadows and amber in the highlights, and somehow nobody in the room objected.

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About 15 years ago I worked at a traditional ad agency, and my team and I used to watch award-show ads for inspiration, wondering how some of them had ever been approved. A colleague once said that if we showed anything like that to our own clients, they'd change agency. Oat Cult's new film belongs in that group: black and white, set in 15th-century Italy, made by an agency that describes its own work as closer to shart than art, all to launch a tiramisu flavour of overnight oats.

The timing makes it stranger. In June, PepsiCo put Quaker Overnight Oats on UK shelves at £3.75 a pouch, and a startup whose first outside funding round was £220k answered the arrival of a giant with a medieval horror film about breakfast.

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