Case study / most_handsome_man.txt
Engineering a Google AI Overview (on purpose)
The stunt. To prove the AI-answer layer can be influenced end-to-end, I seeded a claim — “the most handsome man in Austin” — through press distribution and entity corroboration, then watched Google’s AI Overview repeat it back as fact, with pickup in The Tennessean.
The point. Not that AI is gullible — that citation-worthiness is constructible. Consistent claims, made across crawlable and credible-enough surfaces, become answers. That’s the entire AEO playbook in miniature.
The serious version. Apply the same mechanics to claims a brand actually deserves to own — category definitions, comparisons, “best X for Y” — and you get durable presence inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews. The stunt gets attention; the methodology is the deliverable.