TaG Makes

LOVE being a podcast guest, and SO SO grateful for the awesome conversation and can't wait for the next one, and check out Pete's youTube (skillion) for more of his podcasts!

https://youtu.be/IGMpV3URTYI?si=a9Lpc4PJvjc_QJO

My first Charleston Tech Week was AWESOME!!
The discussions (on and off the stages) were fantastic, thought provoking, engaging and educational, and I walked away with SO much inspiration and new ideas.
I can not thank the community enough for just letting me be me and being SO welcoming. I had no idea so many AMAZING minds were so close, and I can't wait to get to know you better!!
The tagging list is going to be ridiculous, but thank you DIG SOUTH and Mell Truong for putting together the event, it was beautiful and way beyond my expectations, JT White for introducing me to SO many people, Author for the pointers, Victoria (Tori) Reed, Will Horn and Doug Hamilton, Mike Astle and Lou (Lou, I didn't get to talk to you before you left, but I learned A LOT, thank you!!) for the great insight and blasts from the past with discussions at the CharlestonHacks Hacker Theater (PS, 100/10 recommend, what a wonderful, welcoming group of humans and SO SO much knowledge), thank you Jack Teitel for suggesting it and I can't wait for the next one!

Legit, great discussions all around the pitches were SO COOL, the new things we are doing with tech is amazing, and AI is... well, changing all of it. If I didn't tag you and we met, I apologize, names are NOT my forte (yet), if we didn't get to exchange socials and you want to, please reach out! I love building community and it was a lot at once. Until I see you again!

The face when Charleston’s tech scene shows up and you realize you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.

Day 1 of Charleston Tech Week at with and I am not exaggerating when I say this room was electric.

Standing room only. Purple lights. Real conversations about what’s actually happening with funding, AI, local business, and where this city is headed.

I came from horses and a barn. Now I’m tracking how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity recommend local businesses in real time.

Grateful for every person who showed up tonight and for the community that keeps making this city worth betting on.

Big week ahead. What are you hitting? Drop your must-attend events below and let’s find each other.

I asked ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity to recommend my own business using six different buyer queries. Then I wrote about what happened.
The range was 23 to 95. Same site. Same week. Nothing changed.
The 95 came from a query that sounded like a buyer ready to hire. The 23 came from a query that named a city I do not operate in. That gap is not a flaw in the measurement. It is the measurement telling you exactly what AI actually does with your information.

I used my own site for this because when the test subject is yours, you know exactly what is on it. No guessing about what changed between runs. Nothing changed. That is the point.

There is also a second, smaller force in the data: the same query run two days apart returned different scores. Not because the site changed and not because the question changed, but because AI models are not deterministic. Ask twice, get two shortlists. That inconsistency is not a problem to fix, it's a signal to read correctly.

The full breakdown is live at aroindex.com/insights. It explains how to tell the two forces apart, what counts as noise versus a real shift, and why a single ARO Score reading is a starting point not a verdict.
Run your audit and see what your number actually says.

aroindex.com/insights

One thing I dont think enough people are talking about yet is how much unnecessary computation AI systems are doing trying to interpret confusing websites.
Bad structure forces AI systems to work harder to infer intent, working harder = more water, more cooling, more AI use.

What does this company actually do?
Where are they located?
Are they trustworthy?
What services do they actually offer?
Clear websites reduce friction.

Not just for humans, but for AI systems too.
Which makes me think AI Optimization is eventually going to become less about manipulation, and more about reducing confusion. Special thanks to https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/ for the research!

Hi! I just upgraded my agency console on the ARO Index to include client AND competitor tracking and I need people actually using it, BEFORE Charleston Tech Week (next week).
First 5 agencies who comment get 15 days free, no card, nothing wild, just full client AND competitor tracking, and a free fix plan included. ARO Index tracks who AI actually selects when someone asks for a recommendation, not just who gets mentioned. The only ask is, feedback (but like, nice) welcome, what's missing, what's confusing, what would make you pay for it.
anyone else doing local tech weeks this month? Oh and do they let you bring your dog (Obv, I would only bring one, 2 is too many)?

Pics of my pack this weekend at James Island Co Park :)

I dont think businesses realize yet that AI systems are creating their own version of “local authority.”
Not based ONLY on backlinks or rankings, but on whether the business is consistently understandable across different models.
We’ve been tracking recommendation behavior across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity inside the ARO Index, and there are businesses that show up over and over and over again across all 4 systems, and that consistency is not random.

AI likes clarity, the robots want to find the answers quickly.
Clear businesses become easier to retrieve, easier to explain and easier to recommend.

Confusing businesses force AI systems to work harder to figure out what the company actually does, which honestly feels like a terrible long-term strategy considering where search is going.

The ARO Index is not tracking “AI visibility.”
It's tracking (and recording AND sharing) recommendation behavior, which is a very different thing.
Most businesses are still asking:
“Do I show up?”
Meanwhile the better question is:
“When someone asks AI for a business like mine, who actually gets recommended? and why?!"

The ARO Index tracks recommendation consistency across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity because different AI systems interpret businesses differently, and the overlap between them is where things start getting really interesting because some businesses show up everywhere, and some businesses disappear entirely.

Most have absolutely no idea which category they fall into, you already have an ARO Score, do you know what it is?

Most agencies are still selling rankings, traffic, "share of voice" and “visibility” reports, while AI systems are quietly deciding which businesses get recommended in conversational search, those are two VERY different things and the wild part is, some businesses with objectively worse websites keep showing up across multiple AI systems because they are easier for AI to understand.

Not prettier (the robots can't see your sites branding choices or beautiful hero section) not more expensive, just...clearer.
Clear service structure, clear entity relationships, clear geography and less ambiguity.
Honestly, I think thats why so many agencies are uncomfortable with this shift, because “pretty websites” and “good SEO” are not automatically translating into AI recommendations the way people thought they would.

One of the wildest things happening right now is watching businesses rank well on Google and still barely exist inside AI recommendations, because AI systems are not looking at websites the same way search engines did.

They are trying to understand:
what you do,
where you do it,
whether you are trustworthy,
and whether you are the clearest answer to the question being asked.

Thats why some gorgeous websites completely disappear in conversational search (the robots can't see your pretty hero sections), while simpler sites with better structure keep getting recommended across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity.

The ARO Index started because I wanted to measure what different AI systems were ACTUALLY recommending, not what people assumed they were recommending.

Turns out, there are patterns, clear businesses get recommended more consistently, confusing businesses don't. IMO, I think most agencies are still behind on how big this shift will be.