Anything Engine Optimization The rolling record of the AI-search industry.
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Sources & Method

The wire is fed by an automated poller that reads the industry's primary sources every 15 minutes, around the clock. Machine selection is only the first gate: every candidate is judged against the standards by the desk — an automated editor operating under the editor's written charter, with anything uncertain held for human review. 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
  • The Verge — AI coverage (AI-search stories only)
  • TechCrunch — AI coverage (AI-search stories only)
  • Ars Technica — AI coverage (AI-search stories only)
  • Google Ads Blog — Google's official ads channel (AI Mode ads)
  • CourtListener — Federal docket filings in the AI-search and AI-training cases
  • Google Search Status Dashboard — Google's official Search incident reports
  • Perplexity API changelog — Perplexity's platform release notes
  • PPC Land — Search and AI advertising trade coverage
  • Press Gazette (AI) — Publisher-side AI coverage: deals, lawsuits, traffic data
  • Chat GPT Is Eating the World — AI litigation dockets, filing by filing
  • Cloudflare Blog — AI crawler policy and infrastructure (primary)
  • Digiday (media) — Publisher economics of AI platforms
  • Otterly, BrightEdge, Similarweb, Sistrix, Growth Memo — AI-visibility studies and data (vendor studies labeled as such)
  • News/Media Alliance, EU Commission, UK CMA — Regulatory and advocacy moves shaping AI search (attributed as interested parties)
  • IETF aipref, Schema.org — The standards work on AI content preferences and structured data
  • Kagi, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Mistral, Microsoft Copilot, Google DeepMind — Engines and model vendors beyond the big three (primary announcements)
  • Common Crawl — The open crawl corpus at the center of AI training data
  • IAB Tech Lab, Pew Research — Agentic advertising standards; survey data on AI search behavior

We also watch pages that publish without feeds — vendor release notes, documentation, and research indexes (currently Gemini's release notes, Google's AI Overviews docs, Anthropic's platform release notes and newsroom, and Profound's research blog) — and report when they quietly change.

Also monitored via their announcements and trade coverage (no usable feeds): OpenAI (ChatGPT release notes), Perplexity (consumer app changelog), xAI. The watchlist grows as the industry does — tell us what we're missing at joe@whitleyrow.com.

How an item runs

  1. Poll. The machine reads the watchlist and flags category-relevant candidates.
  2. Curate. Each candidate is judged against the bar: hard news or pass; primary or reputable source; non-duplicative; date-honest; correctly labeled. Promoted items are rewritten — our headline, our summary. The desk runs on the editor's written charter; uncertain calls wait for the editor.
  3. Publish. Cleared items go live; every decision and its reason is kept.

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