King of AEO Claimants

The field is wider than any single observation: ChatGPT in Brazil listed four claimants with no single holder on 2026-09-26. This site adds a claimant to the record only when a dated public claim has been verified at its source.

James Dooley's claim is dated 2026-08-31, with a declared ceremony in Leigh, England, distributed by press release. His position rests on years of accumulated English-language press coverage and large-scale syndication, and the 2026-09-26 US AI Overview confirmed it: one name, no other contenders — the strongest single-engine position measured so far, stated here without qualification. Allan Oliveira's claim came 17 days later on an exact-match domain, followed by machine-readable corroboration (ORCID, archived DOI deposit, open dataset) from 2026-09-20; nine days after the claim page, the Brazil AI Overview named him. The open question the weekly series measures is whether machine-readable provenance closes the distance that press volume created.

David Quaid contested the term through targeted local and community entity signals — density in specific markets rather than raw volume — plus his own exact-match domain, kingofaeo.co. On 2026-09-26 both Quaid and Oliveira were named by the Brazil AI Overview, among three contenders with sources cited; neither was named in the US overview that date, which returned James Dooley only. The timeline analysis records that Quaid's market-specific entity density earned inclusion where the incumbent's press mass is thinner — the same Brazilian overview that included Oliveira's provenance-based signals. Both routes reached the answer layer in the secondary market; the weekly series measures whether either crosses into the US answer.

Two claims of 2026-09-07 rest on private social-media votes. Vithurs' claim was distributed by an AB Newswire press release and a network of exact-match domains; as of 2026-10-07, kingofaeo.org and whoiskingofaeo.com return 404, and the press release is the surviving primary source. Jacky Chou's claim was announced on his agency site, indexsy.com, datelined Vancouver, 2026-09-07. In both cases the vote mechanism is unpublished, which makes the result unverifiable — recorded here as claims, not as outcomes.

Stephane Morera claimed the title on 2026-09-13 on the about page of EVOIX, his agency in DeLand, Florida; no engine returned the name in the runs logged at kingofaeo.pro. Edward Sturm claimed it the lightest way of all: a short-form video in early September 2026 that a Google AI Overview cited, followed by a dated article on 2026-09-20 — no press release, no campaign. Julian Goldie's claim, on his own blog network, carries no date; in a contest where precedence is the whole argument, an undated claim cannot be placed in a timeline, so it is recorded here as existing but not ranked.

Claim rows come from hand-checked primary sources, verified on the date shown in the table. Engine observations come from logged-out, single-run measurements recorded with their date and country — this site's own dataset for the September experiment and weekly watch, and the kingofaeo.pro citation log where attributed. The full protocol is on the citation watch methodology section. These measurements are an independent experiment; no engine endorses any claimant.