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.
It is a working manual rather than a survey. Part I makes the case that absence from an answer is a zero rather than a low ranking, and every chapter in it ends with a prompt you can paste into ChatGPT to see your own category, because the book works when you see your own gap yourself, not when someone describes a stranger's. Part II is the repair work in order: whether GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended can reach you at all, what each of the six engines actually trusts, how to write a claim that still says something true once it is pulled out of the page alone, and the kind of evidence that is expensive to fake. Chapter 10 runs the whole diagnosis in a founder's afternoon. Chapter 11 turns it into a monthly number you can read as a trend instead of a vibe.
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. Start with the free AI citation check to inspect crawler access and machine-readability. Confirm your email for a fuller structural audit, or four buyer questions on Perplexity and Google’s AI Overview when live engine results are available.
Eleven chapters, two parts, one appendix you will actually use
Verify your email above for free access to every chapter. Once verified, start at Chapter 1, or choose a chapter below.
- 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 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.
See the available scopes on the comparison page. Sprint and retainer pricing is quoted case by case, because both depend on the site.
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