lukeduff.co.uk
Product Design & Build
Search behaviour is shifting. A growing share of people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews or Gemini a question and take the answer they get, without clicking through to any website. Brands that used to rely on organic rankings now have a blind spot: they have no way of knowing whether the AI assistants that are replacing those clicks ever mention them at all.
AEO Autopilot is Luke's own product, built to close that gap. It tracks whether a brand is cited when the major AI engines answer the questions that matter to that brand, works out why it is being skipped, writes content to fix the problem, publishes that content directly to the brand's WordPress site, and then re-checks to see whether the fix landed. The loop runs without the customer having to do any of the individual steps themselves.
This is an in-progress product build. The technical foundation is complete, including the tracking layer, the publishing pipeline and the safety mechanisms described below. Database wiring and authentication are still on test keys, so the product is not yet transacting.
| Problem | Solution Implemented |
|---|---|
| Brands have no visibility into whether AI assistants ever mention them. | Built a tracking layer that queries the major AI engines for a brand's key questions and records whether the brand was cited in each response. |
| Most monitoring tools stop at the report and leave the actual work to the customer. | Built the complete loop: track, diagnose, generate a fix, publish it to WordPress, and re-check. The tool does the work rather than handing the problem back. |
| Publishing to a customer's WordPress requires handling their credentials without leaking them. | Built a redirect-aware request guard that re-validates every redirect hop and drops the WordPress credential on any cross-origin redirect, closing that leak route at the HTTP layer. |
| Usage quotas can drift or be double-counted when concurrent background workers are running. | Made quota accounting atomic in the database, with a refund path that fires at most once even when two workers race to refund the same job. |
| Retried background jobs risked creating duplicate citation records. | Made citation writes idempotent so a retried job cannot insert a result that already exists. |
| Development was blocked whenever a paid API key was missing. | Built deterministic fallbacks across the engine layer so the full pipeline runs end to end with no keys wired up, and upgrades to the live paid services automatically when keys are present. |