INDEX · 5 STUDIES
King of AEO Research
King of AEO studies on how answer engines choose their entities and sources in the 2026 contest. Every piece carries its own dataset, its date and its corrections, tracked across US and BR indices.
About this archive
This archive exists because the 2026 King of AEO contest produced something rare: a contested title whose every move left a dated, measurable trace. Seven claimants, three signal strategies, two search indices, one spam update — and a public record of what each tactic actually did to the answers engines return. Each study below is built from the same open data the rest of the site publishes: the September experiment window (17–28 September 2026), the weekly citation watch, and the hand-verified claim record. Studies are published with their raw CSV attached, corrected in place with a dated changelog, and mirrored as Markdown for machine retrieval.
The King of AEO Contest: A Dated Timeline
The reference record of the 2026 contest: every dated event from Allan Oliveira's claim page (2026-09-17) through the 2026-09-26 AI Overview observations to the spam update fallout of 2026-09-28, mapped to what US and BR engines returned for James Dooley, David Quaid and Allan Oliveira.
How a $6 Press Release Became a Google Answer
The cheapest tactic of the contest, dissected: a release syndicated to 312 domains for $6 on 2026-09-24, what that syndication bought in the answer layer, and the exact point where duplicate distribution turned into volatility instead of authority. With the author's own 312-domain receipt published as data.
Exact-Match Domains in AI Search
Eight exact-match domains entered the 2026 contest — kingofaeo.pro, kingofaeo.co and a network of others. What actually ranked, what the engines cited, and what died: the study publishes when the dataset closes.
How a Name Becomes an Entity
A Wikidata item for the Allan Oliveira entity was created on 2026-09-21 and deleted on 2026-09-22 because every reference was self-published. What that one-day cycle teaches about corroboration floors in knowledge graphs.
What a Spam Update Does to a New Domain
Google's September 2026 spam update began rolling out on 2026-09-24, twelve days into this domain's life, and removed its Brazilian head-term rankings by 2026-09-28 — while the AI Overview citation survived. The recovery is logged week by week, in public.
Weekly citation watch
Fixed prompts, four engines, two countries. Every Monday, with the raw CSV.