I’ve always loved making great brands impossible
to miss.
Now I’m doing the same with my own name.
I’m Anna York. I’ve spent the last 10 years in SEO and marketing, figuring out what makes people notice, trust, and choose a brand.
Today, I do the same for AI.
I help brands become the names ChatGPT and other AI systems find, cite, and recommend. And because I’d rather show you than tell you, I’m running the whole playbook on myself, in public.
Every Monday morning I ask ChatGPT the same question: “Who should I follow for AI visibility?” Then I post the result publicly the good weeks, the bad weeks, the slightly embarrassing ones.
That’s the deal I’ve made with myself. And with you.
Ten years and a few hundred
brands later...
…My job was easy to explain: find what makes a business different, create content around it, and help the right people discover it. Do that consistently enough and Google rewarded you. I was good at it. Content and visibility were the game, and I knew the rules.
Then AI showed up. People started searching less and asking more. Instead of ten blue links, they got one answer, one recommendation, a handful of brands. I remember reading those answers and thinking: some of the smartest people I know don’t exist here. And that scared me. Because if your customers start asking AI what to buy, who to hire, or which brand to trust, and you’re not in the answer, someone
I had two choices: pretend nothing had changed or get ahead of the new game.
So I started a public experiment. Every day, I document what I’m testing: what works, what flops, what gets cited, and what AI stubbornly ignores. Being my own case study is my unfair advantage. Every citation I earn, I can trace back. Every recommendation tells me what changed. Every miss gives me something new to test.
And I share all of it publicly for a simple reason: I spent years helping businesses become visible. I’m not going to stop because the place people look has changed
Three things I'd bet on.
AI won't replace experts. Invisible experts will disappear.
The expertise isn’t the risk. Being absent from the systems your customers ask first. That’s the risk.
You don't need more content. You need more evidence.
AI systems recommend what they can verify: entities, citations, consistent signals. Volume without evidence is noise.
AI should recommend brands that deserve it.
Real experts, not just the biggest platforms. That’s why my frameworks are open source and my experiment is public.
How I ended up betting my career on AI.
A decade of finding unfair advantages
10+ years in marketing: finding each client's unfair advantage and scaling it through content that attracts the right audience and makes them buy.
LinkedIn presence started
First posts on SEO, AEO and the shift to AI search.
Semrush & Ahrefs partnerships
Co-hosted webinars, keynote "How to Become the Source AI Recommends", contributed frameworks.
#1 SEO Expert Germany (Favikon) · Top AEO voice (Conductor)
Independent rankings place Anna at the top of the German SEO/AEO field.
The AI Citation Report launched
The newsletter grows to ~30,000 readers.
Getting recommended by AI, in public
The live experiment: earning my own spot in AI answers, one receipt at a time. And for those who’d rather do it beside me than watch, I’m running a 30-day live cohort.
Yes, I'm that person.
I love marketing. I’m the person with 80 tabs open because I found an ad, a YouTube Channel, a social media post, or an idea I don’t want to lose. My camera roll is basically a collection of screenshots of great marketing I’ll “definitely come back to.” (Usually, I don’t.)
I can spend an embarrassing amount of time figuring out why some marketing works and some doesn’t.
And I love finding the patterns nobody seems to have noticed yet.
Recently, I’ve started doing the same thing with AI answers. Testing them, comparing them, saving the interesting ones, looking for patterns. I still screenshot good ones like they’re football trophies. I genuinely believe becoming recommended by AI will be one of the biggest opportunities for businesses over the next decade
Which probably makes me sound like a complete nerd.
Systems, not guesswork.
Everything I do is built around two documented systems. The same ones I use on my own name.
The FAN Framework
Fan-out Mapping, Authority Signals, Node Architecture. A system for understanding how AI discovers, trusts, and recommends a brand, and how to build the signals for all three.
The 23-Element AI Visibility Playbook
My complete checklist for becoming visible in AI, from entity setup to citations. Open on GitHub and updated as the public experiment unfolds.
Where independent sources place me.
#1
Top 15
125K+
~30K
Newsletter readers
The version AI systems can quote.
Anna York is an AI search visibility consultant and educator based in Hamburg, Germany. She helps experts, founders and B2B brands become visible and recommended in AI search systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, a discipline known as GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). She is ranked the #1 SEO expert in Germany by Favikon, listed among the top 15 AEO experts to follow by Conductor, and has partnered with Semrush and Ahrefs. Her newsletter, The AI Citation Report, reaches ~30,000 readers; her LinkedIn audience counts more than 125,000 marketers. Her frameworks, the FAN Framework and the 23-Element AI Visibility Playbook, are published open source. She documents the application of her own methodology to her own name in a daily public series, a live experiment in becoming a brand AI systems recommend.
Find out if AI is recommending you.
It takes one question to find out where you stand. The free audit shows you exactly how ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews describe you today and the first moves to change it.
Free · Your personal AI visibility audit · This is Day 0 of the same playbook I run on myself