Your buyers are asking ChatGPT and Google who to buy from, and right now the AI is naming your competitors, and you probably don’t even know it’s happening.
That’s because the AI doesn’t hand people a list of websites to click through any more. It gives them an answer with a few names in it, and most people just go with those names. If yours isn’t one of them, you never even get a look in.
The good news is the AI doesn’t pick the biggest brand. It picks the one it understands most clearly and can quote most precisely, and that’s something you can actually work on.
Why a second edition
I published the first edition, The AI Overview Playbook, in March 2026. It was built on one case, my own startup AeroChat, and it was about Google’s AI Overviews only.
A lot has changed since then. Google, ChatGPT and Gemini now behave quite differently from each other, and in the same week one of them can drop you while another keeps naming you first. The broad structure of the method still holds, but some of what I believed in March turned out to be wrong, so I rebuilt the playbook around what actually happened when we ran it.
What’s new
The second edition is built on six real businesses, wins and failures included:
- A brand-new coffee store I built just to test the method, with no backlinks, no ads and no reviews. Google’s AI named it first two days after it went live, and the first real enquiry came in on day ten.
- A bakery that stayed at position nine on Google the whole time, and still got named in 29 of 44 AI answers.
- A branding agency that went from not named to named first without a single change to its own website.
- AeroChat, a security company, and my own agency, Stridec.
It also adds the step most people skip: mapping every question your buyers actually ask, your keyword universe, before you decide what to write.
What you get
- The book: the six-step method, the six business stories, and a reference section you’ll keep coming back to.
- The Toolkit: worksheets, a page brief you can hand to any writer, six copy-paste AI prompts and checklists.
- The Qwang Coffee case: the full coffee store experiment, screenshot by screenshot.
If you bought the first edition, the second edition is already in your Gumroad library at no extra cost.
The playbook is US$297, a one-time purchase. Get the AI Search Playbook here.
If you’d rather have us run it for you, that’s what our managed service is for.