Anything Engine Optimization

The rolling record of the AI-search industry.

Edited by Joe Balewski

Seen something in an AI answer we should know about? Send it in. [email protected] — tips credited, always.

Sources & Method

The wire is fed by an automated poller that reads the industry's primary sources roughly every 20 minutes, around the clock. Machine selection is only the first gate: a human editor judges every candidate item against the standards before anything publishes. Most candidates don't run.

The watchlist

  • Search Engine Roundtable — Daily search-industry reporting
  • Search Engine Land — Search trade press
  • Search Engine Journal — Search trade press
  • Google Search Central Blog — Google's official search-developer channel
  • The Keyword (Google) — Google's official product announcements
  • OpenAI News — OpenAI's official announcements
  • Bing Blogs — Microsoft's official Bing announcements
  • Ahrefs Blog — SEO tooling vendor (AI-search coverage only)
  • Semrush Blog — SEO tooling vendor (AI-search coverage only)
  • arXiv — Preprints matching generative/answer engine optimization

Also monitored via their announcements and trade coverage (no usable feeds): Anthropic, Perplexity, Otterly, Profound. The watchlist grows as the industry does — tell us what we're missing at [email protected].

How an item runs

  1. Poll. The machine reads the watchlist and flags category-relevant candidates.
  2. Curate. A human judges each candidate: hard news or pass; primary or reputable source; non-duplicative; date-honest; correctly labeled. Promoted items are rewritten — our headline, our summary.
  3. Publish. A deliberate, human step. Nothing auto-publishes.

The dates you see on items are the source's dates, not ours — when we catch something late, the item says so.