TL;DR

Google just announced what we’ve been calling visibility engineering at Spin Sucks for almost a year. That validates the work. It does not close the gap. There are actually two visibility gaps — the external one (do AI systems see your brand?) and the internal one (do the people who sign your budget connect the work you’ve been doing to the headlines they’re reading?). Most communications teams are losing the second one without realizing it. This is Part 4 of The PESO Operating System series, and it’s about how to close both.

Key Insights

• Google’s I/O 2026 announcement formalized what Spin Sucks has been calling visibility engineering since last summer.
• The visibility gap has two halves: an external gap (your brand isn’t legible to AI systems) and an internal gap (your leadership doesn’t connect your year of work to the news cycle they’re reading).
• The internal gap is a vocabulary problem. The industry has at least six names for the same body of work: visibility engineering, GEO, AEO, AI search optimization, AI-discovery readiness, and agentic readiness.
• Even Google’s own product teams disagree. Search Central says you don’t need llms.txt. Lighthouse flags you if you don’t have one.
• Communicators are doing the work and losing the credibility, budget, and seat at the table for it.
• Buyers don’t type keywords anymore. They submit briefs. If your operation isn’t built to answer briefs across paid, earned, shared, and owned channels at once, you won’t be visible in the new system.
• Closing both gaps starts with four small, structural moves you can make in the next 10 business days.

The Visibility Gap: Two Halves, One Operating System Problem

A friend texted me early Tuesday morning (post holiday weekend) with three links—TechCrunch declaring “Google Search as you know it is over,” a TechRadar piece comparing the new AI overhaul to Don’t Look Up (the asteroid, in this case, being Reddit), and Search Engine Journal’s latest SEO Pulse breaking down Google’s May core update on top of the I/O AI redesign.

At the end of that list of links, she said, “Have you all talked about this yet?”

I told her yes. For almost a year. We’ve been calling it visibility engineering ever since the first credible research began landing last summer, showing people were swapping Google for ChatGPT.

Her reply is why this article exists.

She told me she knew I’d been talking about visibility engineering forever. At this point, she said, it felt like common sense. But Google has just announced something huge, and even though she’d read everything Spin Sucks has published, she hadn’t connected what I’d been saying to what Google just said.

Because they aren’t being called the same thing.

She compared it to her mom saying “reel” when she means “extension cord.” Same object, different word. If your mom asks for the reel and you don’t speak reel, you stand in the garage staring at the wrong shelf. (That visual makes me laugh!)

That is the whole problem, captured in one visual. And it’s much bigger than the text my friend sent.

This is Part 4 of The PESO Operating System series:

1. Part 1 argued that PESO has graduated from a framework to an operating system. 
2. Part 2 named the AI-era discipline problem that quietly undoes most teams’ best work.
3. Part 3 walked through the six stages of the PESO Model® Maturity Ladder. 

In between, we’re diagnosing award-winning brands and campaigns. We started with Budweiser and, last week, we diagnosed Liquid Death sitting at the very top.

Today, I want to talk about visibility. Specifically, the two gaps almost nobody is naming, and how to start closing both.

The External Visibility Gap

The external visibility gap is the one everyone is talking about right now. It’s whether your brand actually shows up where buyers, journalists, candidates, regulators, and investors are now looking for you.

That part is real. Google itself just confirmed it.

AI Overviews now reach more than 2.5 billion monthly users. AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users, with queries doubling each quarter. ChatGPT, for comparison, sits at 900 million weekly active users. (For those of you who don’t do math, that’s 3.6 billion monthly users.)

Google is rolling out an interface that builds custom widgets inside the search results page, “information agents” that run 24/7 on your behalf, and mini-apps you can use inside Search using the way you speak (no more keywords!). 

Liz Reid, Google’s VP of Search, is calling it the biggest change to the search box in more than 25 years.

Google, of course, won’t let search die; it’s just different now. We’re moving further into a world where visibility is better than clicks. 

You already know this, of course. The industry has been talking about how to market in a zero-click world for a couple of years now, but this news from Google makes it more imperative that you have a strategy to replace those links and show up wherever someone asks a question that you are best suited to answer. 

If your content doesn’t earn its way into an AI Overview, an AI Mode citation, an information-agent monitoring loop, or a generative UI module, it might as well be in a filing cabinet never to be seen or heard from again.

But there’s a second gap. This is the one my friend’s text exposed. The one almost nobody is talking about. The one that’s about to slow your team down inside your own organization.

The Internal Visibility Gap

Here is what I keep running into in client conversations, workshops, and Spin Sucks community threads.

We ARE doing the work.

We’re refactoring earned media for citation, not for clicks. We’re auditing owned-media surfaces for AI-readability. We’re rebuilding shared and paid plans around discovery rather than impressions. We’re attending webinars on visibility engineering and answer engine optimization. (Hi, Martin Waxman and the IABC crew—that was a well-spent 30 minutes.)

And then we walk into the CMO’s office, or the executive team meeting, or a board call, and someone slides a Wall Street Journal or TechCrunch article across the table and says, “Are we doing anything about this?”

The communicator says, “Yes — we’ve been doing it for months.”

The CMO says, “That doesn’t sound like the thing the article is talking about.”

Because it’s not being called the same thing, not because you’re not doing the work.

That’s the internal visibility gap. And it’s costing you credibility, budget, and a seat at the table—at exactly the moment we should be gaining all three. 

This is the same problem we consistently see when people take the self-diagnosed PESO Model® Diagnostic (and something I’m actively trying to solve). 

Marketers and communicators tell us “we run PESO as a system,” and then they score at the bottom of the ladder.  

Not because we aren’t doing the work. Because the work isn’t being named, sequenced, or documented in a way that leadership can see. 

Visibility engineering has the exact same problem. Just on a faster news cycle.

Why the Vocabulary Doesn’t Match

The industry is currently using a bunch of different names for substantially the same body of work:

• Generative engine optimization (GEO)
• Answer engine optimization (AEO)
• AI search optimization
• AI-discovery readiness
• Agentic readiness

Even Google’s own product teams can’t agree. Search Central is telling SEO experts that they don’t need to bother with llms.txt. The Lighthouse team is flagging sites that don’t have one.

Google is rebuilding Search around AI while simultaneously telling everyone the fundamentals still apply. The infrastructure is changing faster than the guidance.

When the people building it can’t agree on what to call it, the people consuming the news—your CMO, your CEO, your board, your clients—certainly cannot connect their internal work to it.

Which means the gap was never about whether you’re doing the work.

It’s about what makes sense to the people who sign the checks and make the decisions. 

What Visibility Engineering Actually Means

We’ve been using visibility engineering since last summer. While it’s not substantially different than all of the acronyms being thrown around, it’s more about the practice of making your brand legible to AI systems AND to the humans they serve.

It is not SEO with a fresh coat of paint. It’s not even GEO or AEO. It’s using those practices combined with your earned and owned media chops to ensure you’re visible in all the places the LLMs and the humans look.

It is a re-engineering of how the four PESO Model® channels — paid, earned, shared, owned — work together so that the system (Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, whatever comes next) can recognize, cite, and route back to your authority.

As consumers, we’re no longer typing “running shoes” into our search bars. We’re now asking AI, almost always by voice, “What are the best running shows for someone with a narrow foot and a high arch who wants to run four half-marathons this year on the pavement?” 

This is not a keyword search. It’s a brief that is highly specific, in this instance, to me. And your searches are even more specific to what you’re looking for in that exact moment. 

It’s an operating system shift. 

If your marketing or communications operation isn’t built to answer briefs across paid, earned, shared, and owned channels at once, you won’t be visible in the new system. Full stop.

Four Moves to Make in the Next Ten Business Days

If you do nothing else when you finish reading this article, do these four things in the next two weeks.

Name the work inside your organization

Number one, name the work inside your organization. 

Choose one term—visibility engineering, AI-discovery readiness, GEO, whatever—and use it consistently with your CMO, your CEO, your board, or your clients. 

The point isn’t which word wins. The point is that when an executive reads a TechCrunch piece and asks if you’re on top of it, the term in the headline matches the term in your roadmap.

Of course, I am quietly lobbying for visibility engineering, because it actually describes the work. But I won’t fight you. Use the term you’ll actually use. 

Send the proof

Second, send proof of the work you’ve already done.

Pull together one short brief—half a page, no more—showing the visibility engineering work you’ve already done that maps to these recent announcements. 

Don’t write it for communicators. Write it for the executive who just read Sarah Perez’s TechCrunch piece on their phone in the car line.

Name the surfaces (AI Overviews, AI Mode, information agents, generative UI). Name the actions you’ve taken. Name the gaps you’d close with more investment.

This is the document that quietly gets you the budget conversation you’ve been waiting for.

Audit what AI actually sees

Number three, run your brand through at least four different AI tools (the free versions are fine), and ask each the actual questions your customers/clients ask. Not your keywords. Their briefs. (“What’s the best PR agency in the Midwest for a regulated B2B brand under $50M ARR?”, not “PR agency Chicago.”)

Write down what comes back. Write down what doesn’t. Write down what’s wrong.

You can also use a tool like Brandi to automate and track your visibility.

You can’t measure what you don’t track, so get to measuring! 

Decide what comes off the plate

And number four, decide what comes off the plate. 

This is the hard one, so most teams skip it. In fact, I just said to the leadership team here, as we’re going through planning for the second half of the year, “You must bring three stop doing things to our meeting!” We all want to do all the things all the time!

The same thing goes for you. If your team is still spending the bulk of its time chasing impressions and clicks on dying surfaces, the visibility engineering work won’t happen. It can’t. 

Look at your last quarter’s calendar. Choose three things to retire.

(I know. It’s uncomfortable. Do it anyway.)

Visibility Engineering is Your 2026 Go-To

When we mapped the PESO Model Operating System series back in April, we held this slot for the visibility gap because we knew the news cycle would break sometime between May and June. The Magic 8 Ball that sits on my desk is a true predictor of the future!

What it didn’t tell me, though, is that it would arrive this neatly packaged. 

Google has now done the rhetorical heavy lifting for us. The question of whether AI is reshaping discovery is closed. Even your most skeptical exec knows that this is where we are.

So now the real work is closing the internal visibility gap so the communications function gets credit for the visibility engineering it’s been quietly doing for a year—and gets resourced for the next 12 months of it. 

Next week, we’ll go inside the enterprise-readiness side of this. Specifically, what senior buyers and senior internal stakeholders actually need to see before they’ll greenlight visibility engineering investment. 

If credibility is what got you here, readiness is what closes. 

Until then: name the work, send the proof, audit what AI sees, decide what comes off the plate. 

Take Your Own PESO Model® Diagnostic 

If you want to know exactly where your team sits on the PESO Model® Maturity Ladder—and where your visibility engineering work is or isn’t legible to leadership—take the PESO Model® Diagnostic.

It scores you across owned, earned, shared, paid, measurement, and integration. It surfaces the gap between your self-rating and your actual performance. And then it tells you the next move.

It’s free. You can take it as often as you’d like. And it produces a one-page picture your CMO can take into a budget conversation. Not because the diagnostic is magic, but because it makes the work legible. That is the whole point.

If you want to climb rather than only know where you stand, the PESO Model® Certification trains internal integrators to run the next-stage moves.

Or shoot us an email! We’d love to help you figure out where to go from here, especially this cycle, when getting the diagnostic done matters most.

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