Published Date: July 7, 2026
A More Comprehensive Answer to “What is AI Saying About my Business?”
Welcome back to To the Power of X. In episode 2, Chuck, Kayleigh, and Will pull back the curtain on CARL—the Cognitive AI Ranking Lab—and why we created it instead of buying something off the shelf. The short answer is that we couldn’t find any software that gave us enough real, actionable data, so we built it ourselves.
In this episode, we get into:
- What CARL actually is and how it works
- Why AI visibility data is so hard to get right (and what most tools get wrong)
- How AI “architects” a response rather than retrieving one
- The concept of shadow prompts and why they matter for your content strategy
- The four components of CARL: research, software, model, and insights
Will breaks down how LLMs don’t pull from an index the way search engines do. They construct an answer, and that process involves rewriting the user’s question entirely before responding. Understanding that shift is what separates a reactive content strategy from a predictive one. Plus: why points of transition are the biggest opportunity in AI search, how tracking the right prompts matters more than tracking broadly, and details into the research that’s informed the data CARL brings to the table.
Whether you’re trying to understand AI visibility for the first time or you’re deep in the weeds on content strategy, this conversation gets specific.
Our Favorite Quotes from This Episode:
- “Tomorrow is going to be different from today. And if we try to pretend like it’s not, we’re already behind.”
- “If you know that this question is going to start to be asked by everybody, answer it now before your competitors do and get a lock in on the large language models from a trust and authority perspective, because you’re going to get a huge leap ahead of folks. And if you nurture that continuously, you can maintain a lead and it might be the game-changer for your business.”
- “And that’s where I’m really excited about being on the cutting edge and being able to deliver the most value to our clients.”
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Kayleigh Crandell
Kayleigh Crandell is a dynamic marketing professional with a passion for project coordination, creative storytelling, and community engagement. As Marketing Projects Coordinator at Xponent21, she leads initiatives across content, SEO, social media, and creative campaigns, collaborating closely with clients and internal teams to deliver outstanding results.
