The same diagnosis we run for paying clients, written out
Search is splitting. A growing share of buying questions never reach a results page at all: they get answered inside an assistant, which names two or three companies and moves on. If you are not one of them, you do not get a lower ranking. You get no mention, and no notification that it happened.
Part I makes the case that this is a survival question rather than a marketing tactic. Each chapter in Part I ends with a prompt you can paste into ChatGPT immediately. The book works when you see your own gap yourself, not when someone describes a stranger's. Part II is the repair manual: crawler access, extractable pages, evidence that beats claims, entity clarity, and the monthly rhythm that turns all of it into a trend you can read.
How the book treats AI answers. Every AI answer in it, and every answer you generate while reading it, is a point-in-time observation. Engines change their answers between sessions, accounts and days. Anyone selling you a promised citation or ranking is selling something they do not control. What you can control are the inputs. That is the whole subject.
Eleven chapters, two parts, one appendix you will actually use
Every chapter is readable here in full, free and without an email. Start at Chapter 1, or jump straight to whichever gap you already suspect.
- Part I: The stakes
- 01The Screenshot. The moment a founder sees the answer that names everyone but them.
- 02The Quiet Migration. Where the buying questions went, and why nothing alerted you.
- 03Invisible Is the New Page Two. Absence from an answer is not a lower rank. It is a zero.
- 04Ranked vs. Cited. Two different games, and why winning the old one no longer wins the new one.
- 05Compounding Absence. How not being named this quarter makes you harder to name next quarter.
- Part II: The fix
- 06Can the Machines Even Read You? Per-bot access: GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and the rest. Fix this before anything else.
- 07The Six Engines and Who Each One Trusts. What each system actually sources from, and how that changes the work.
- 08Extractable or Invisible. The extraction test: does a claim still say something true, complete and attributable once it is pulled out alone?
- 09Receipts Beat Claims. Named authors, dated numbers, disclosed methods. The signals that are expensive to fake.
- 10The Founder's Visibility Audit. The whole diagnosis in one afternoon, in five lanes.
- The close
- 11Measure Like an Operator. Same prompts, same file, every month. Deltas, not vibes.
- AThe Founder's AI Visibility Checklist. The book on one page, in severity order. Read it on the web.
- BGlossary. Citation, delta, entity, extraction test, llms.txt, query fan-out, zero-click.
- CThe Tools. The shortcuts, disclosed plainly, including our own.
Jason Colapietro
Founder of Suede Labs AI, a music-technology company built on the conviction that creators should own their work, their rights and their visibility. The visibility half turned into a practice: running founders' categories through ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, capturing timestamped screenshots of who the machines recommend, and shipping the repairs. This is his fourth book, published under the Johnny Suede Press imprint by Jason Colapietro, who writes under the pen name Johnny Suede.
The evidence standard the book argues for is the one this practice is held to: merged pull requests you can open rather than claims you have to take on faith. In partnership with Google Cloud since September 2025: a dedicated account team and migration of the Suede stack to the Vertex AI suite.
The five published books are on Kindle, and this one is free here instead: The Human Authenticity Layer on ownership and origin as AI redraws the creative map, Proof as Infrastructure on systems whose correctness does not rest on trusting an operator, Stake Your Claim on treating AI as an owned asset, The Claude Code Bible and Codex in Production, the two operator's guides to running coding agents as real infrastructure. The Signal Chain is self-hosted.
Run it yourself, or have it run
The audit in Chapter 10 is genuinely a founder's afternoon, and the point of the book is that you can do it. If you would rather have it done: optimize.suedeai.ai checks whether AI crawlers can read your site in about ten seconds, free. And this practice runs all five lanes continuously (GEO, PR, credibility, reputation, visibility and authority treated as one job) for a small number of companies.
Scope and price are quoted by reply. Both depend on the site.
Yours to keep and to share
Free to download, read and forward to anyone who needs it, including inside your company. Please do not resell it or republish it as your own. Quote it with attribution and a link back to this page. Both editions carry the same text; the PDF is set for 6×9 print, and the EPUB reflows for e-readers and phones.