Why AI Search (AEO) Recommends Your Competitor (and Has Never Heard of You)
Hosted by: Edinburgh Royal Bank Accelerator
Date: Monday, 3 August 2026 · 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM
Location: Edinburgh Royal Bank Accelerator, Edinburgh
Booking via Eventbrite
About the event
Somewhere right now, your ideal customer is asking ChatGPT to recommend what they should buy and who to buy from. The system names a handful of businesses.
Yours isn’t one of them. Not because you’re worse than those who got named, but because the AI engine doing the recommending hasn’t been given a reason to believe in you.
Most businesses are already losing this game without realising it, and the reason has almost nothing to do with scale, quality, or budget. In this session, you’ll learn why some businesses get recommended by AI, and most don’t, then test what AI currently believes about your business live, in the room. From there, you’ll learn how to shape the narrative and start influencing the recommendations.
Get ahead of the game before this becomes the obvious thing everyone is scrambling to fix.
What you’ll learn
- Know exactly what AI currently believes about your business, tested live in the room, with a method simple enough to rerun every week afterwards
- Understand the real reason most businesses never make it into an AI recommendation, and how to reverse-engineer the results
- Leave with one concrete action for the week ahead, tied directly to what you discover about your own business during the session
Who it’s for
This masterclass is built for:
- Founders and business owners who suspect they’re invisible to AI tools like ChatGPT, even when their business is a strong fit for the customer asking
- Anyone who has never tested what AI actually says about their business, and wants a live, repeatable way to check
- Teams preparing for a marketing or growth push who want to understand AI discovery before investing further in traditional SEO or content
- Operators who assume AI visibility is about size or budget, and want to see why that assumption is wrong
About the speaker
Sid Kathirvel (Unlock Growth) is a Fractional CMO and Growth Mentor with 25 years of experience helping startups and SMEs scale revenue without burning cash or energy. Known for transforming scattered marketing efforts into structured growth systems, his approach delivers measurable, repeatable results through customer-led strategy and rigorous experimentation.
Anurag Ahluwalia is Co-Founder of JOAN UK, a specialist practice helping financial services firms understand, measure, and improve how they are discovered, represented, and recommended by AI systems. With 18+ years in digital search visibility and prior experience at NatWest/RBS and Sainsbury’s Bank, he brings direct expertise in AEO, SEO, and GEO strategy to the session.