Hot Stuff Creative’s AEO Dashboard for May 2026
Welcome, Hot Stuff Creative. This is your May 2026 report on how visible your brand is to AI search engines: ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Claude, and Grok. Below is a month-over-month look at your performance, how you compare to the four other companies in your cohort, and what changed across the AI search landscape this month. The five tiles below and the links throughout take you deeper.
Your AI SuperScore and the 10 Categories That Build It
Your SuperScore sits at the center, surrounded by the ten categories that feed it. Each category shows this month’s score plus how much impact and effort improving it carries. Click any category to open its full breakdown and recommendations.
Impact reflects how much headroom a category has to lift your SuperScore; effort reflects the typical work involved. Higher scores are always better.
Explore Your Dashboard
There are five places to go deeper from here. The first three tiles break down the scores and metrics that build your AEO performance. The last two cover the signals around your brand and the AI platforms that read them.
Your Biggest Win and Biggest Risk
The two categories that matter most this month: where you are furthest ahead of the cohort and should protect that lead, and where the largest gap to the cohort leader is open and worth closing first.
Your May 2026 Performance
Below are your headline numbers for the month, including your overall score, how the cohort stacks up, and which categories moved most. This is the right place to start before going deeper.
Your AEO Score
This is your combined score across all 10 AEO categories for the month, shown on a 0 to 100 scale. Higher means stronger overall visibility in AI search. Track this number over time to see your trajectory.
This is your May 2026 score.
Three Quick Takes on Your May Report
Where You Gained Ground This Month
These are your three categories with the biggest score gains since last month. They show parts of your AEO that are moving in the right direction, so keep doing what is working here.
Where You Need Attention Now
These are your three lowest-scoring categories for the month. They are the biggest opportunities to focus on next, because small lifts here move your overall score the most.
How You Compare to the Cohort
Below are four views of how your May scores stack up against the four other companies in your cohort and against your own April numbers. Together they surface where you lead, where you trail, where you gained ground, and where the widest gaps sit.
How Every Company Performs in Each Area
This is a bird’s-eye view of all 5 companies across all 10 AEO categories for May 2026. Darker cells mean stronger scores. Your row sits at the top so your position is the first thing you see. Hover any cell for the exact score.
Your Win and Loss Record Against the Cohort
Across all your scored metrics this month, this is how often your score beats, matches, or trails the cohort average. It is the simplest read on how many individual battles you are winning.
Where You Rank in Each Category
This shows your rank position from 1st through 5th in each of the 10 categories. The arrow on the right tells you whether you moved up, moved down, or stayed put compared to last month.
What Moved Up and Down This Month
These are your category-score changes from last month, sorted biggest gain to biggest loss. The longer the bar, the bigger the swing. This is where the month’s most newsworthy shifts show up.
Your Strengths and Weaknesses at a Glance
These are your 10 category scores layered over the average of the four other companies in your cohort. Where the solid shape extends past the dashed line, you are leading the cohort. Where it pulls inward, the cohort is ahead.
Turning Scores Into Priorities
Three views that translate your scores into a plan: which actions give the most return for the least effort, where the gap to the leader is widest, and how much overall score you can still recover.
Impact vs Effort: What to Do First
Each dot is one of this month’s 30 recommended actions, placed by how much it can move your score (higher is better) against how much effort it takes (further left is easier). The actions in the upper-left corner are your quick wins. Color shows the resource area: Coder, Content, or Coordinator.
How Far Behind the Leader You Are, by Category
For each category, this is the number of points between your score and the cohort leader’s, sorted widest gap first. The longer the bar, the more ground there is to make up.
How Much Score You Can Still Recover
Starting from your current SuperScore, this shows the projected lift from closing your top opportunities one by one, building toward where you could be if all of them were addressed.
Your Off-Site Brand Signals
These are the brand-strength signals from outside your website that AI engines weight when deciding who to mention and cite. They sit alongside your on-site work as the second half of what AI engines see about your brand.
Off-Site Signals Impacting Your AEO Score
These are brand-strength signals from outside your website, including social reach, reviews, posting cadence, video audience, and more. Each card shows your May value, the direction of monthly change, and where you rank among the 5 companies in your cohort.
What’s New in AI Search This Month
These are the most recent developments across the six major AI search engines that decide who to surface and cite. Engine-level changes can shift which sources get cited even when your own signals stay flat.
Top News This Month From the AI Search Engines
Here are the most recent developments in each of the six major AI search engines for the month. To see each platform’s full strengths, weaknesses, and detailed update history, visit the Platforms page. Open Platforms ›
May 2026 Recommended Actions
Each month we publish a fresh set of 60 recommended actions to improve discovery of your brand. The full action plan lives on your SuperScore page, grouped by the resource type best suited to deliver on each opportunity: coder, content, and coordinator. Open the SuperScore to view all three blocks, expand any action for its reason and supporting metric, and download the full list as a CSV.
SuperScore
This page shows the overall AEO score for your cohort, built from 43 metrics and 182 signals that map how well each brand will appear in AI engines and content. The score covers 10 areas of digital marketing that compose your profile for ChatGPT (OpenAI), Google Gemini (including AI Overviews), Microsoft Copilot (including Bing AI), Perplexity, Claude (Anthropic), and Grok (xAI).
Data analyzed: 5 companies · 10 score areas · 43 metrics · 182 signals
AEO SuperScore
Hover over a dot to see the category breakdown for that company. Click any category to drill in. Higher is always better. A score of 0 means the brand is absent on that dimension; 100 means the brand has won what is achievable.
Explore Each Category
Open any of the 10 categories that make up your SuperScore for the full breakdown.Cross-Category Recommendations for Hot Stuff Creative
May 2026 Recommended Actions
Below are 60 recommended actions for the month, grouped by the resource type best suited to deliver each one: coder, content, and coordinator. Each item explains the reason and links to the underlying metric, category, or signal where you can read the supporting analysis. You can also download the full list as a CSV.
AEO Platforms: What's Happening in AI Search?
This screen tracks the latest developments across the AI engines that power AEO. Each platform has its own priorities, signals, and update cadence, and each one represents a channel where your brand may or may not appear.
Platform Intelligence · May 2026
6 platforms tracked
Platform Updates
Below is the latest intelligence we have on each AI engine as of May 2026.
Overview
Broad usefulness, conversational fluency, and a fast pace of product innovation. Excels at writing, coding, research, and multimodal tasks.
- Versatility and ecosystem depth
- Strong writing, coding, and research
- Rapid product innovation
- Occasional hallucinations
- Shifting model behavior
- Enterprise transparency concerns
What's New with ChatGPT
- Daybreak: cybersecurity initiative using GPT-5.5 and Codex Security to find software vulnerabilities
- Expanded enterprise services via a deployment-focused consulting business
- Stronger push into large-scale corporate AI adoption and security
Overview
Integrates Google Search, Workspace, and Android with strong multimodal reasoning, document analysis, and real-time web context.
- Ecosystem reach and search connectivity
- Multimodal reasoning and document analysis
- Real-time web context
- Uneven response quality and inconsistency
- Fragmented messaging across overlapping AI experiences
What's New with Google Gemini
- New Gemini model updates and expanded agentic coding capabilities ahead of Google I/O 2026
- Continued market-share gains as AI is embedded deeper into Search, Workspace, and Android
Overview
Practical productivity inside Microsoft 365, Windows, and Azure. Strongest for documents, spreadsheets, and enterprise workflows.
- Deep business integration and security controls
- Strong document and spreadsheet support
- Native to Microsoft 365, Windows, and Azure
- Variable creativity
- Value depends on full Microsoft ecosystem
What's New with Microsoft Copilot
- Tighter integration with enterprise workflows and security-focused AI initiatives
- Modest market-share gains among Microsoft 365 customers
- Steady, measured expansion; no major standalone launches this month
Overview
Trustworthy, citation-based answer engine focused on fast web research and surfacing sources clearly.
- Transparency and citation-rich answers
- Speed and focused research workflows
- Strong current-information summarization
- Less creative writing polish
- Heavy reliance on external sources limits originality
- Can propagate source inaccuracies
What's New with Perplexity
- Continued scaling of its subscription-first answer engine
- Rebound in market-share usage data
- Growing adoption among users seeking transparent, citation-rich alternatives
Overview
Emphasizes safety, thoughtful reasoning, and clear writing. Especially strong for long documents, nuanced analysis, and coding support.
- Natural tone and strong context handling
- Long documents and nuanced analysis
- Reliable coding support
- Stricter refusals
- Occasional rate limits
What's New with Claude
- Surging revenue and enterprise adoption
- Momentum from strong coding performance and long-context capabilities
- Gaining enterprise ground against OpenAI
Overview
Real-time awareness, irreverent tone, and tight integration with X. Strong for trending topics and conversational responses with personality.
- Real-time social context from X
- Conversational personality and humor
- Strong on trending topics
- Less mature enterprise adoption
- Inconsistent output quality
- Fewer workflow integrations than competitors
What's New with Grok
- X integration remains the key differentiator
- Adoption reportedly lagging behind larger competitors
- Softening downloads and enterprise usage; pressure to improve product performance