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AEO Page Grader is live. Paste in a URL, get a score for how ready your content is to be cited by AI. It's at aeopagegrader.com right now.

The news this week was genuinely good. Google put Gemini inside its ad platform in a way that's bigger than the headlines made it sound. And a Wharton professor wrote something in HBR that put language to a feeling I've had for a while now: the buyer journey we all built our careers on isn't just shifting. It's being gutted. The whole thing. And the window to get ahead of it is open right now.

That's what we're getting into this week. Let's go.

No one knows how to audit their web pages for AEO.

I was doing it by hand. Opening pages one by one, not knowing what I was doing. No benchmark. No score. No way to prioritize what to fix first. Just a spreadsheet that made me feel productive without actually being productive.

So, I built a tool to fix that.

Here's how I approached the benchmark for scoring: VPNs are one of the most brutally competitive content categories on the internet, both for SEO and AEO. Getting cited by AI in that space is genuinely hard. The pages that do get cited are doing everything right. So I used that content as the standard. If I could identify what made those pages earn citations in one of the hardest categories to crack, there would be a framework that would hold up anywhere else. That’s the standard baked into every score.

aeopagegrader.com lets you paste in any URL and get an instant score for AI citation readiness. It breaks down how your content is structured, whether AI systems can actually synthesize it, and where the gaps are.

Is it the most sophisticated AEO tool on the market? No. But it gives you a real number in about ten seconds, and a real number is way more useful than my gut feeling and a half-finished audit doc. This is the type of tool that will need to be updated as models change.

Try it here → aeopagegrader.com

Stefano Puntoni, a marketing professor at Wharton, published a piece in Harvard Business Review that I keep coming back to. His thesis: AI is reshaping marketing on two fronts at once. First, conversational AI is replacing traditional search as the way people learn about products. Second, and this is the one that should keep you up at night, AI agents are beginning to make purchasing decisions on behalf of humans entirely.

That second part deserves a full stop and a re-read. Your next customer might not be a person. It might be an algorithm evaluating options and transacting autonomously, with its own decision logic that your current marketing strategy has never accounted for.

Read the HBR piece here

Here's where my head goes after reading it.

The current buyer journey, the one we all built our careers on, awareness to consideration to decision, is being gutted. Not gradually. Now. When someone asks ChatGPT about your product category, they are not visiting your website, not clicking your ads, not following your nurture sequence. They are getting a synthesized answer, and if your brand is not structured in a way that AI can cite and trust, you simply do not exist in that moment.

This is the gold rush. And we are standing at the opening of it.

Think about the early internet. Companies that figured out their web presence in 1996 had to wait years before it paid for itself. The results were generational. Companies that nail AEO right now are in the same position, but the feedback loop is shorter, and the compounding is faster. Start today, not tomorrow. Test everything. Your structured content, your schema, your answer capsules. The cost of experimenting is near zero. The cost of waiting is not.

Two other things from this article I can't stop thinking about.

Chatbots sit in a genuinely untapped spot in the buyer journey. A well-built AI experience could take a buyer from "I have this problem" to "here is your solution, here is how to buy it" in a single conversation. Awareness to conversion in one sitting. No funnel, no drip sequence, no sales call. That is not theoretical. That is a product decision waiting to be made.

And then there's this: every company has an ICP right now. An Ideal Customer Profile. A description of the human buyer. But if AI agents are making purchasing decisions autonomously, what does your Ideal AI Persona look like? What does the agent optimize for? What signals does it trust? What content structure makes it choose you? We do not have a framework for this yet. The marketers who build one first will have an advantage that is very hard to catch.

Google used its NewFront event to announce what it's calling the "Gemini advantage" across Google Marketing Platform. The headline feature is Ads Advisor, now available inside Display & Video 360. You type a prompt, "build this media plan," "show me underperforming line items," "why did performance drop last week?" and Ads Advisor translates that into concrete actions or dashboards. The Campaign Builder, which will translate an uploaded media plan into a full DV360 configuration, is coming soon.

This is just the beginning, and I think most marketers are underestimating where it lands. The endpoint of all of this is a non-seasoned marketer typing "I want to launch my first Google Ad for my vertical SaaS" and Gemini handling placements, creative, targeting, and budget recommendations. That future is not here yet. Right now, you still need to know what a media plan looks like to use these tools, and this is all living inside DV360, the enterprise programmatic platform, not the Google Ads console most of us actually use.

But the trajectory is clear. Google is systematically replacing every step that requires a specialist. Reporting. Creative diagnostics. Campaign setup. Each one is now a prompt. The steps between "I have a product" and "my ads are live and optimized" are collapsing, one feature release at a time.

The people who understand the strategy behind the inputs will always outperform the people who just type prompts and hope. Gemini can launch the campaign. It can't tell you who your customer actually is.

→ Read Google's full announcement here

The buyer journey is being rewritten in real time. Google is building the autopilot. Your next customer might be an algorithm.

None of that is a reason to panic. It's a reason to move.

The marketers who understand what's happening right now, not in a year, not when it's (more) obvious, are the ones who will have something to show for it. Build the tool. Structure the content. Ask the question nobody in your org is asking yet.

See you next week.

— Dustin

If you know a marketer who's been waiting for permission to start building, forward this to them. You can subscribe to Tidepool here.