Two searches, two very different results. The gap in the middle is the whole story.
Here’s an AI discoverability experiment worth running on yourself before someone else runs it on you.
Search your own name alongside what you do, in my case, “Mike Evans AI disruption keynote speaker.” My site dominates the results. Frameworks, credentials, the book, all of it, cleanly summarized and accurately attributed. By that measure, I look great.
Then I asked the question an actual buyer would ask, without knowing my name: “best keynote speakers on AI disruption and the future of work.” My name didn’t appear. A handful of curated “best of” lists did, and a set of well-known names from those lists. Not me.
The Gap Nobody Sees Until They Test It
This is the exact gap a piece of industry content crossed my desk about this week: as more research happens inside private AI conversations instead of public search, businesses stop competing for clicks and start competing to be the answer. If the AI doing someone’s homework never surfaces you, it doesn’t matter how good your website is, how strong your credentials are, or how right your framework is. You don’t get invited to make the case. The case gets made without you.
I’ve spent 27 years building a body of work that holds up under scrutiny, real frameworks, real Fortune 50 results, a real book. None of that is the problem. The problem is that being right, and being findable by an AI system doing someone else’s research on your behalf, are two different jobs. I’d only been doing one of them on purpose.
Why AI Discoverability Isn’t an SEO Problem
Here’s the reframe worth some thought: your AI discoverability, not your search ranking, is the real problem now, optimizing a website for search rankings alone won’t fix it. The new game is being distinct enough, and validated in enough of the right places, that the sources an AI system trusts can’t leave you out of the answer.
That’s not a tactic. It’s the argument at the center of the Kryptonite Defense. Distinction isn’t a claim you make about yourself. It’s proof other people and sources make on your behalf, in enough places that a system synthesizing an answer has no way to skip you.
The Big 3 Questions Behind Every “Best Of” List
Every curated list an AI system pulls from was built by a human who, whether they’d have named it this way or not, ran the same three questions on every name that made the cut. I’ve taught these for years. They’re the core of the DISTINCTION chapter in Distinct or Extinct, and it turns out they’re exactly what determines whether a source, or the AI reading that source, can tell you apart from the other 50 qualified people in your category.
Dramatic difference. Not your minor variation, not your slight improvement, your dramatic difference. When someone, or something, is deciding who belongs on a “best AI disruption keynote speakers” list, “he’s good at his job” doesn’t separate anyone from the pack. Good is the price of admission. Different is what gets you on the list.
Overt benefit. A genuine dramatic difference does nothing if nobody can see how it helps them within about ten seconds. If a source has to explain what you do at length before the value lands, that source isn’t going to summarize you cleanly for an AI model either. AI compresses everything down to the clearest signal it can find. Vague doesn’t compress.
Reason to believe. Results delivered. Problems solved. People who will vouch for you. This is exactly the layer AI is best at aggregating and worst at inventing. If the proof doesn’t already exist in enough places that a source can point to it, the AI has nothing to cite, no matter how real the work actually is.
Jerry Garcia said it better than I ever could: you don’t want to be considered the best of the best, you want to be considered the only one who does what you do. Best is a competition, and any AI model can flatten a competition into a ranked list in seconds. Only is a category of one, and a system built to summarize the internet has no way to leave a category of one off the list.
What I’m Doing About My AI Discoverability
I’m doing the unglamorous work now, auditing where the lists and sources an AI would actually trust and cite live, running my own dramatic difference, overt benefit, and reason to believe through the same test I’d put any client through, and making sure the case for me exists in those places, not just on my own site.
If you haven’t tested your own AI discoverability, not your competitor’s, for the exact thing you want to be known for, you might be more invisible than you think. And unlike a bad Google ranking, you won’t find out from a customer complaint. You’ll just never come up.
Not sure where your organization actually stands as this shift plays out? Take the Kryptonite Scorecard, about 12 minutes to find out. And if this resonated, you can find Distinct or Extinct on Amazon.