It’s your right to know what AI is saying about your business.

A couple of weeks ago I was scrolling Instagram over coffee and an ad stopped me. Some tech guys, selling a tool for something called GEO. Generative engine optimization. Put a pin in that, I’ll come back to it.

What SEO, GEO, and AEO actually mean

Quick definitions first, so I’m not talking at you in acronyms. SEO, search engine optimization, is all the work that makes your website show up when someone types a question into Google. GEO, generative engine optimization, is that same instinct pointed at AI: getting your business to show up when someone asks ChatGPT or Claude instead of Googling. Some people call it AEO, answer engine optimization. Same thing, different letters.

You’ve probably also heard that SEO is dead. I want to push back on that. Hold that thought too.

The $399 tool I found on Instagram

So these guys (I always assume it’s guys lol) are selling a product for $399 a month. Here’s what it does: it tells you what all the major AI engines are saying about your business, how they’re describing you, whether any of it is even accurate. Then it hands you the copy you’d need to write to start showing up in those answers. That’s genuinely useful. It’s a great idea.

Why the fuck does it cost $399 a month??? That’s an insane markup on something I think you have a plain right to know.

Because here’s my actual belief. You should be able to find out what AI is saying about your business, whether it’s true, and what you could do to change it. That shouldn’t be a subscription. That should be a given.

So, is SEO actually dead?

Now back to the SEO-is-dead thing, because it connects.

I don’t think SEO is dead. I think the internet changed, fast, almost overnight, and we’re all still holding a playbook from the old one. Ten years ago the internet was a big pile of separate websites you clicked between, and the playbook matched it. Build your site, earn backlinks, become a referenceable domain, climb the rankings. So that’s what we did.

Let me tell you what that felt like from the inside. In 2021 I was running my yoga studio and fighting to keep it open through the pandemic. I’d Google “yoga studio Portland Oregon,” sometimes literally sitting inside my own studio while I did it, and my studio wouldn’t show up until page seven. Page seven of Google is where businesses go to die.

What made it worse was who did show up. Studios on pages one and two that had already closed for good. They still had domain authority, so Google still ranked them. So when I typed in that search, I wasn’t looking at a market. I was walking through a cemetery, and I couldn’t tell who was alive and who was dead. Meanwhile the living business, the one I was sitting in, fighting for, was buried seven pages back. You go to yoga classes that you find on page one, not seven.

That’s when I understood I had a visibility problem.

I found an agency and paid them $10,000 over ten months to fix my SEO. And it worked. We went from page seven to the top five results, organically. That was real, and it mattered. It was also ten thousand dollars I could barely spare, and I said no to every upsell along the way.

Years later, visibility still decides whether a small business lives. What’s changed is how you become visible.

The internet is a library now, and AI walks the stacks

The internet isn’t a pile of websites anymore. It’s a library, and AI is how most people now walk the stacks. You want the best donut shops in Portland before a trip, you don’t scroll ten blue links. You ask, and something reads the whole library back to you and hands you a list of ten. The only question that matters for your business is whether you’re on it.

That’s what GEO actually is. It’s the same question SEO always asked, moved into a new house. Can people find you. Except now the thing deciding is an answer, not a ranked page of links, and you usually never see how it got made.

Why the New York Times is nervous about all this

Okay, one more thing before I tell you what I did, because this is what actually made me sit down and write this. The New York Times ran a piece called “Politicians Are Trying to Change What Chatbots Say About Them.” And the whole vibe of it was pearl-clutchy-esque. Campaigns have a scary new problem, because when a voter asks ChatGPT about a candidate, the bot just says whatever it happens to know. Sometimes that’s nothing. Sometimes it’s half the story.

The guy they open the story with is Dustin Lloyd, running in a Democratic primary for his state legislature out in Missouri. Real person, known all over his own town. But the chatbots had no idea who he was. So he figured out how to fix that and get the true stuff about his campaign to show up when people asked. And the article treats this like he did something a little shady.

I read it and I was like, that’s not shady. That’s what it feels like being on page seven. That’s a real person who exists getting buried by a machine that hasn’t caught up to him yet, same as my studio was buried under all the dead ones. When Dustin Lloyd makes sure the internet knows he’s alive and running, we don’t call that manipulation. We call it having a website.

Here’s what the article actually did for me though. If some guy running for state legislature has already figured this out, and the New York Times is already clutching its pearls about it, then this isn’t some far-off thing. It’s here, and it’s happening at the top. And the only people who don’t get to play are the small businesses who need it the most and are never going to hand over $399 a month to find out what the robot is saying about you or pay an agency $10,000 to do it for you.

So I built a free version, and here’s why I’m giving it away

So. Back to the Instagram guys and their $399 a month.

I screenshotted the ad, fed it to my agents, and asked two things. What is this, and how hard would it be to build. The answer was, “not hard.”

So I built it. It’s called Kariops Pulse, and it does close to the same thing that tool does. It scans how you show up across the major AI engines, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. It tells you what they’re saying about you, and whether it’s accurate. Then it drafts the exact copy you should add to your site and your content to start showing up in those answers. You run it once a month and watch what moves.

You’ll notice Google’s AI Overviews aren’t in that lineup. That’s on purpose, not an oversight. You can’t reliably get one to show up, so there’s nothing steady to track month to month, and they have a real habit of saying wrong things with total confidence. Not forgotten. Just not something I’d want you building your visibility on yet.

It’s free.

Let me be precise about “free,” because I never want to become one of the people I’m complaining about. The tool is free to use. The only cost is a few dollars of your own API keys from the four engines, Perplexity, Gemini, Anthropic, and OpenAI. You grab a key from each and load about five bucks on it. Call it $20-25 total, and because you only run the scan once a month, that lasts you months.

It runs as an MCP, which is worth explaining since most people haven’t heard the term. Think of it as a connector that lets the tool live right inside your Claude app, so you’re not logging into one more dashboard. You just talk to it in plain English and it does the work. Setup is about fifteen minutes. I’ve written full instructions, and there’s a form where you can grab fifteen minutes of my time. I’ll walk you through getting your keys and switching it on. You never have to book anything, sign up for a retainer, or talk to me again to keep using it.

Here’s why I’m giving it away, honestly. A lot of agencies, some of them well-meaning B Corps, are gearing up to charge fat monthly retainers to tell you what AI says about you. It’s the exact shape SEO took ten years ago, when knowing whether you were visible became a thing you had to keep paying for. Fuck that. Knowing how you’re being reported on is not a premium feature. It’s a right. Paying someone to build you the fix is fair. Paying just to find out what the robots are saying about you is not. And if you want to pay people to do it for you, then you go Glen Coco. And if you want to be able to do it yourself, then it shouldn’t be this hard.

Sometimes adding the copy the tool gives you is enough, and you’ll watch yourself show up. Sometimes it isn’t, because the reason you’re invisible is buried in the technical guts of your site, and no tool can magic that away. That’s the part you might actually want to hire someone like me for. But you should get to see what’s going on for free first, and decide from there.

I’ve started to see myself as a bit of a Robin Hood in this AI game. I charge where I need to charge. And I’ve gotten good enough at building that I can turn around and make small tools that hand the same power to people who could never justify $399 a month for it. The tools belong to us. Not the institutions, not the corporations, not the guys running the ad. Us. So for everyone out there trying to charge you just to know the basics, good for them, I’m going to keep building around them.

Go find Kariops Pulse. I also submitted it to become a Claude plugin, so it might show up natively inside the Claude app too. Either way, it’s about five minutes to connect as an MCP inside your Claude subscription, and again, grab fifteen minutes and I’ll do it with you.

If you try it, tell me what you think. Get in touch and walk me through how it went. I actually want to know. And if there’s AI work you’re looking to pay someone to do, consider me, or don’t. There are a lot of ways to get help and I’m one of them.

In the meantime I’ll keep building free tools so you can go figure out what the hell is going on in this crazy-ass internet age.