// resources and guides

Hear what the internet is saying

Practical guides, resources and news for marketers who want to grow. Understand your audience across social networks, find new leads and partnership opportunities, keep track of how AI describes your brand, and pick up tips to build your visibility along the way.

AI Visibility 101·14 July 2026·6 min read

Does your brand name affect AI search visibility?

You picked your name for the domain, the trademark search and the way it sounded in a pitch meeting. Nobody asked whether an AI assistant would know what it meant. It turns out that question matters more than most naming checklists account for.

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Listening 101·6 min read

How do social listening tools work? The pipeline behind the dashboard

You open a listening dashboard and see "sentiment up 8%" or "312 new mentions this week." Here's what actually happens between someone posting online and that number showing up: how social listening tools collect, clean, score and deliver the conversation.

14 July 2026

AI Visibility 101·7 min read

What is AEO? Answer engine optimisation, explained for B2B teams

AEO gets used two different ways: the older discipline of winning a featured snippet, and the newer one of being the answer an AI assistant gives a B2B buyer. Here is where the term came from, how it overlaps with GEO, and what actually matters if you sell to other businesses.

13 July 2026

Playbooks·6 min read

Social listening for founders: why it matters before you have a marketing team

You're doing sales, product and support before breakfast, so a listening tool sounds like a nice-to-have for later. It isn't. Here's why social listening pays off earliest for founders specifically, and the five things worth watching from day one.

11 July 2026

AI Visibility 101·8 min read

How AI crawlers find and cite your brand

AI assistants don't read the web the way a human does. A separate fleet of bots crawls your site, a different process decides what to retrieve when someone asks a question, and only a fraction of what gets crawled ever makes it into an answer. Here is how the pipeline actually works, and what to fix first.

9 July 2026

AI Visibility 101·7 min read

How to measure AI search visibility: a step-by-step method

Knowing you should track appearance rate, share of AI voice, win rate and sentiment is the easy part. Here is the actual method: how many prompts to run, across which models, how often, and the mistakes that quietly wreck the numbers.

8 July 2026

Playbooks·7 min read

How to do social listening for free

You don't need a five-figure contract to know what people are saying about your brand. Here's exactly how to do social listening for free: the manual searches that cost nothing, where they fall short, and how a free tool tier closes the gap.

7 July 2026

AI Visibility 101·6 min read

How to improve your AI search visibility: a practical playbook

Measuring your AI search visibility tells you where you stand. This is what to actually do about it: the content, coverage and technical fixes that move whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini recommend you, not just mention you.

6 July 2026

AI Visibility 101·8 min read

GEO vs SEO: what actually changes

GEO gets described as SEO for AI, and that's close enough to be useless. Here is what genuinely changes when you go from optimising for a search results page to optimising for an AI assistant's answer, and what stays exactly the same.

5 July 2026

AI Visibility 101·8 min read

How AI buyers shop: inside 59 real AI buying journeys

We watched AI buyers shop one brand's category end to end: 59 conversations across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Grok, 293 prompts, 316 brands named. AI buyers do not behave like search visitors. They interrogate, they compare, and they pick a winner. Here is what that looks like, and the numbers that describe it.

3 July 2026

AI Visibility 101·7 min read

What is AI search visibility? A plain-English guide

When a buyer asks ChatGPT which tool to use, does your brand appear in the answer? AI search visibility is the practice of knowing, measuring and improving your brand's presence in AI-generated recommendations. Here is what it means, why it matters and how to start.

29 June 2026

Listening·15 min read

Which AI is winning the conversation? ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini and Cursor, compared

We pointed Babel42 at the public chatter about the five AI tools everyone is arguing over, across X, Bluesky, YouTube and Hacker News. Grok owns the raw volume, Cursor and Claude are the best-liked, Bluesky is hostile to nearly all of them, and what each tool is famous for splits along surprisingly clean lines.

16 June 2026

In the news·12 min read

What does the internet think of the UK's social media ban?

The UK announced an under-16s social media ban, and we listened to the conversation across X, Bluesky, YouTube, Instagram and Mastodon. The verdict was sceptical: negative posts outnumbered positive ones by roughly four to one, and on X the opposition was close to total.

15 June 2026

Playbooks·6 min read

How to grow your organic marketing with social listening

Generic growth advice says to post consistently and write content that resonates. Fine, but about what, and for whom? Here are five practical ways social listening answers the questions that advice skips: what to write, who to partner with, where you stand against competitors, and how to feed your search and AI visibility.

12 June 2026

In the news·12 min read

What does social media think of the SpaceX IPO?

We tracked the SpaceX IPO across X, Bluesky, Mastodon and Instagram in the build-up to listing. Overall negative sentiment hit 31%, narrowly beating positive, but the four platforms told four very different stories.

12 June 2026

Playbooks·8 min read

Finding new partners through the power of social listening

The best brand partners, creators and collaborators are already talking about your space. Here's a marketing playbook for finding them with social listening: search your niche, sort by reach, read the influence score, and build a shortlist worth pitching.

9 June 2026

Listening 101·7 min read

What is social listening? A plain-English guide for 2026

Social listening sounds like enterprise jargon, but the idea is simple: know what the internet is saying about the things you care about. Here's how it actually works: the platforms, the features and the workflow, and how to start for free.

28 May 2026

Playbooks

Playbooks·2 min read

A founder's guide to handling a reputation wobble

One bad thread won't sink you, but ignoring it might. A calm, five-step playbook for spotting, sizing and steering a reputation moment before it becomes a crisis.

15 May 2026