We all spent the last decade learning how to get onto page one of Google. That page is quietly disappearing. People ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Google's AI Overview instead, and they get back one answer with two or three businesses named inside it. There's no page two to settle for.

You're in the answer or you may as well not exist.

The problem is that everyone selling you a fix for this has invented a pile of new acronyms to do it. AEO, GEO, LLMO. I'm going to skip all of that and explain what's happening in ordinary words, because none of it is as complicated as the industry needs you to believe.

I run Cold, a digital agency in Essex. We build brands and websites and then market them, so I've watched this land on the build side and the marketing side at once, across law firms, manufacturers, insurers, cyber security companies, charities and councils. The pattern is the same everywhere. The content getting quoted is rarely the mass-produced stuff. It's specific, it has a view, and it was obviously written by someone who has done the job. The businesses winning here aren't the ones publishing the most.

What I'll cover: where AI answers pull their sources from, the technical basics that make your site readable to them, why publishing AI-written content is now working against the businesses doing it, and where to start if you have no budget and nobody in-house.

You'll leave knowing how to check whether an AI names your business today, which takes about five minutes, and what to change first if it doesn't. There's time for questions at the end, and I'll be on stand B700 by the main entrance for the rest of the show if you'd rather ask something quietly.