Aimee Jurenka | Signals Over Noise
Presented by seo SUSTAINABLE
Signals
Over Noise
Exploring the signals that shape AI Search.
AI Search is changing fast. Every week there’s a new platform, a new acronym, a new hot take, and a new reason everyone is supposed to panic.
I’m more interested in the signals.
The signals that help AI systems understand expertise. The signals that influence visibility. The signals worth paying attention to.
Signals Over Noise is where I share what I’m learning through research, experimentation, and what is probably an unhealthy amount of curiosity.
The Shift
From Rankings to Recognition
The more I study AI Search, the less interested I become in rankings and the more interested I become in recognition.
Traditional search rewarded rankings. AI-powered search increasingly rewards recognition. Those questions are increasingly more interesting than rankings alone.
Do you rank?
↓
Does AI recognize you?
AI systems are now interpreting, summarizing, and recommending brands often before a user ever clicks a link. Visibility depends on being understood, not just indexed.
The Approach
Working Strategy Down,
Not Keyword Up
Traditional SEO often starts with keywords. I prefer starting with strategy.
Once the right questions are answered, content, structure, schema, and measurement all become much more meaningful.
Start here
What do you want to be known for?
Then ask
What expertise should be associated with your brand?
Then ask
What topics deserve recognition?
Then build
Content, structure, schema, and measurement — in that order.
Define → Structure → Reinforce → Measure
Four stages. Each one builds on the last. The goal throughout: making your brand easier to understand, recognize, and recommend.
Define
What do you want to be known for?
- Topic entities
- Expertise mapping
- Entity relationships
- Visibility opportunities
Structure
Can AI systems understand it?
- Information architecture
- Schema markup
- Entity relationships
- Content structure
Reinforce
Are the right signals strengthening recognition?
- Mentions & citations
- External references
- Community participation
- External validation
Measure
Is recognition increasing?
- Visibility & recognition
- Entity presence
- Mention rate tracking
- Benchmarking over time
Tools Born From Curiosity
These exist because I needed them. I was trying to understand something, couldn’t find a good way to measure it, and ended up building something. That’s pretty much the origin story for both of these.
Mention Rate Tool
I was doing mention rate tracking by hand, and it was taking forever. So I built this. It runs structured query sampling across AI platforms and gives you actual data: not vibes, not screenshots, not a handful of prompts.
Topic Entity Schema Generator
Schema is one of those things that’s genuinely useful for AI visibility and also genuinely tedious to write. This generator handles the structure so you can focus on getting the entity relationships right.
Community
Taking the Work Out Into the World
Conferences, podcasts, interviews, and the occasional guest post. I like talking about this stuff with other people who find it interesting.
About
Aimee Jurenka
AI Visibility Strategist · Signals Over Noise · seo SUSTANABLE
I’ve been working in SEO for a long time. And then AI Search happened, and I got completely obsessed with a different set of questions.
Not “how do you rank?” but “how does AI decide what to recommend?” Why do some brands get mentioned and others don’t? What actually influences that? I’ve been running experiments, documenting what I find, and building tools to measure things that weren’t easy to measure before.
That’s what Signals Over Noise is. A place to share what I’m learning from seo SUSTAINABLE, my company, which has been home to this work from the beginning.
