Redcap Food Service’s AEO Dashboard for August 2026
Welcome, Redcap Food Service. This is your August 2026 report on how visible your brand is to AI search engines: ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Claude, and Grok. It shows where you stand today and how you compare to the five other companies in your cohort. Your SuperScore and the Accessibility, Authority, and Citability categories have three independently confirmed months of history (June–August); the other seven categories were first measured this month, so the June and July points shown for them are a disclosed flat-hold estimate from the August score (rendered as a dashed, muted line) rather than a confirmed capture. The 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.
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.
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 ›
Your August 2026 Performance
Two quick reads on your month: how your category strengths and weaknesses compare to the cohort, and where your overall score ranks against the other companies.
Your Strengths and Weaknesses at a Glance
Your 10 category scores layered over the cohort average and over the cohort leader. Where your solid shape extends past the dashed line you lead the cohort; where the red line sits outside yours, the leader is ahead in that area.
How You Compare to the Cohort
Three views of how your August scores stack up against the five other companies in your cohort: the full cohort grid, your win and loss record, and where you sit in each category’s field.
How Every Company Performs in Each Area
This is a bird’s-eye view of all 6 companies across all 10 AEO categories for August 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 Sit in Each Category’s Field
For every category, your score (blue dot) is placed on the 0–100 field against the full cohort range, the cohort average, and the cohort leader. The closer your dot is to the right, and the further it sits past the average mark, the stronger your position.
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.
August 2026 Recommended Actions
This month’s highest-leverage move is a sustained content-expansion effort targeting keyword coverage and topical depth — the common thread across Coverage, Relevance, Originality, and indirectly Authority and Citability, your four lowest-scoring categories this month. Implementing basic schema markup is the fastest independent win, and a coordinated review-generation push is the fastest win in Trustworthiness. Below are the 30 actions we recommend this month, grouped by the resource type best suited to deliver each one. Open the SuperScore to read every action with its reason and supporting metric, or download the full list as a CSV.
Explore Your Dashboard
There are three places to go deeper from here. The first two break down the scores that build your AEO performance; the third covers the AI platforms that read them.
SuperScore
This page shows the overall AEO score for your cohort, built from 10 category scores 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: 6 companies · 10 score areas
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.
The SuperScore line itself is confirmed June-August history. In the June/July category breakdown shown on hover, rows marked est. are a flat-hold estimate from August for categories first measured this month, not a confirmed capture.
Explore Each Category
Open any of the 10 categories that make up your SuperScore for the full breakdown.Cross-Category Priorities for Redcap Food Service
August 2026 Recommended Actions
Below are the 30 highest-leverage recommended actions for the month, grouped by the resource type best suited to deliver each one: coder, content, and coordinator. Each item names the metric it targets and explains the reason, with a link to the underlying category 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 · August 2026
6 platforms tracked
Platform Updates
Below is the latest intelligence we have on each AI engine as of August 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
- Updated GPT-5.6 Sol for Plus/Pro users with a thinking-effort slider and more reliable answers (Aug 6)
- Made GPT-5.6 Luna the default model for Free/Go users, with unlimited Luna text chats rolling out the following week
- Added a new “Think” button for harder questions
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 Gemini
- Launched Gemini 3.7 Flash, a low-cost model for coding and agents (Aug 13)
- Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash reached general availability for controllable AI video generation (Aug 27)
- Added Gemini 3.5 Transcribe speech-to-text, launched the Pixel 11 series with Gemini Nano, and announced free AI access for students
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 Copilot
- Made Anthropic's Claude models selectable in Copilot for Word (Web), generally available (Aug 11)
- Rolled out Copilot Notebooks markdown support to all users
- Added Excel theme-design and Power BI grounding skills, plus PowerPoint comment tasks and skills
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
- Added Computer in Email; set GPT-5.6 Terra as default Computer subagent model and Luna as default for scheduled automations (Aug 24)
- Added Grok 4.6 access and DeepSeek V4 Pro in Perplexity Computer; improved Search-as-Code execution reliability from 81.9% to 92.6%
- Added connector-approval controls, released a public Search SDK for Python, and added Kimi K3 and NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning to the Agent API
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
- Published its August risk report disclosing a UK AISI cybersecurity evaluation incident and raised its cybersecurity risk assessment from “very low” to “low”
- Opened a research preview of the Model Hardware Standard for physical-device agents (Aug 27) and published details on how Claude's text watermarking works (Aug 14)
- Named Mariano-Florentino “Tino” Cuéllar Chief Global Affairs Officer (Aug 4) and funded research on AI's impact on human wellbeing (Aug 25)
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
- Announced Grok 4.6, focused on long-running agents and interactive/visual work (Aug 12)
- Grok 4.6 integrated into GitHub Copilot (Aug 11), launched on Amazon Bedrock (Aug 19), and became available through Microsoft Foundry (Aug 26)
- Grok Build expanded to all subscription tiers; Grok Bot expanded to SuperGrok, Cursor Pro, and Cursor Teams; released Imagine Image 2.0 (Aug 7)