Forthcoming Winter 2026 · By Eric Wing
The Vanishing Brand
A Detective's Guide to Generative Engine Optimization
You can have real expertise, accurate information and an established brand and still disappear from AI-generated answers. The Vanishing Brand examines why, and offers a practical way to investigate the evidence AI systems can find, retrieve and trust.
The brand exists. The answer leaves it out.
Being known to your customers is not the same as being understood by an AI system. Accurate information may exist but be difficult to retrieve, hard to interpret or insufficiently corroborated elsewhere.
The problem is often the evidence surrounding a brand, not simply the amount of content it publishes. More pages do not necessarily resolve conflicting information, unclear relationships or missing context.
An investigation, not a list of tactics
The book approaches Generative Engine Optimization as investigative work: examine what systems can retrieve, understand and corroborate, then follow the gaps in the evidence.
That means asking what an answer is built from, where the brand's expertise can be verified and why a system might reach a different conclusion than the organization expects. The emphasis is on evidence and judgment, not a promise of guaranteed visibility.
For people responsible for being understood
The Vanishing Brand is intended for marketers, executives, business owners and professionals trying to understand AI visibility. It connects the question of discoverability to the larger responsibility of making an organization's expertise clear and credible.
It grows out of my work in marketing leadership and my ongoing questions about AI, search and digital change.
Related essays
My essays look at what happens to expertise when software does more of the finding, and what still holds up when the tools change.
- What Nearly Two Decades of Digital Change Has Taught Me About What Actually Matters
- Why Are We So Determined to Prove That Work Was Hard?
Book and media inquiries
If you are writing about the book, want an advance conversation or are planning an event around it, get in touch. You can also explore the subjects I speak about and read more about my background.
Book and media inquiries →