AI systems don’t simply rank brands anymore. They interpret them, compare them and frame them for buyers. The Gist Visibility alone no longer wins. AI-generated discovery depends not just on appearing in answers, but on how consistently and accurately brands are represented. AEO is becoming brand measurement. Representation and sentiment increasingly shape whether AI systems frame brands as credible, differentiated and recommendable. AI search behaves differently than SEO. Prompt variability and model fragmentation mean marketers must analyze patterns across platforms instead of relying on single-query rankings. As AI-driven discovery becomes a core part of the B2B buyer journey, marketing teams are moving quickly to build dashboards around Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) . New tools promise visibility into how brands show up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google’s AI overviews. But while the tooling is evolving rapidly, the way many teams interpret these metrics hasn’t quite caught up.…