Issue No. 06 - July 14, 2026

A few months ago I started documenting what it actually looks like to build an AEO strategy with no technical background, no agency, and no clear roadmap. Just a business problem, a lot of questions, and a willingness to figure it out one step at a time.

That's been the whole point of this newsletter. Not the finished version. The muddy middle of it.

This week I'm sharing something that came out of all of that work.

Over the past several months, I've been deep in the mechanics of AEO for JB Sales: rewriting landing pages, setting up GA4 to track AI referral traffic, running audits, fixing schema markup, building content clusters. The kind of work that feels invisible until it isn't.

Along the way, I kept noticing the same thing. The hardest part wasn't doing the work. It was knowing what to do first, and in what order. Most of what I found online about AEO was either too abstract to act on or assumed a level of technical fluency I don't have.

So when I had the chance to contribute to a framework that walked through the whole thing, phase by phase, I wanted to make sure it was something a non-technical operator could actually use. Not a checklist someone hands you. A guided session you run yourself, with an AI tool doing the heavy lifting on the analysis.

The result is a free prompt pack called Own Your AI Visibility. It's a 45 to 75 minute guided AI session, 8 phases, that walks you through auditing your current AI visibility and building a 90-day action plan. You paste the prompt into whatever AI tool you use, answer the questions, and come out the other side with a clear picture of where you are and what to do next.

I've been working through the exact framework this pack is built on for the past several months. Everything in it is something I've either done myself or learned the hard way. The goal was to let someone skip the months of fumbling and start in a more useful place than I did.

It's free. No catch. You download it, run the session, and you have a plan.

The download link is at the bottom of this issue.

Where this lands in the three buckets

Immediately actionable: Download the pack and run Phase 2 today, even before you go through the full session. Phase 2 is the AI citation baseline: you identify the 3 to 5 questions your best buyer would type into an AI tool, then you go check whether your company appears in the answers. It takes 20 minutes and tells you more about your current AI visibility than most analytics dashboards will.

Start thinking about: Which path applies to you after Phase 4. The pack has a fork: if your messaging is still shifting or you don't have a central piece of content that defines what you do, you build that first. If your positioning is established, you optimize before you add anything new. Knowing which path you're on before you start saves you from doing the work in the wrong order.

Next phase: The 90-day action plan the session produces. Running the session once is useful. Committing to the plan and retesting your AI citation at 30, 60, and 90 days is where the actual results show up.

I'm glad you're here for the muddy middle.

~meghan

Meghan Brenner is COO at JB Sales and founder of The Operator's Notebook. The Muddy Middle publishes every Tuesday.