King of AEO Competition: How It Measures Who AI Names
The King of AEO competition is a public contest that scores the people who claim to be the best at answer engine optimization, and its first round ended with no winner. For anyone who has spent years measuring brand mentions on social media, it is a familiar problem in a new place: counting who gets named, where, and how often, except the conversation now happens inside AI answers.
What is the King of AEO competition?
The King of AEO competition is a scored contest for a title that started as an industry joke in 2026. Answer engine optimization, or AEO, is the work of getting a person or a brand named in answers from ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and similar tools. Eight people claim the King of AEO title. The competition set out to test those claims with a 100-point scoring table, a set of eligibility gates and monthly rounds.
How does the King of AEO competition measure visibility?
The King of AEO competition measures visibility by collecting answers from AI engines and counting which claimants each answer names. Visibility carries 48 of the 100 points. The rest come from an evidence review: 20 for open-source software, 16 for education, 8 for original research and 8 for corroboration from independent sources.
For Round 1 the visibility test scored 117 answers collected on October 13, 2026. The evidence review used a snapshot dated October 4, and the competition notes that a zero in that review is not a finding that a person has done none of that work.
King of AEO Round 1 results
The King of AEO Round 1 results, published on October 14, 2026, put James Dooley on top with 36.61 points out of 100. David Quaid finished fifth of eight on 16.94 points, all of it from visibility, after being named in 59 percent of the scored answers and ranking second of the eight in the US. On a pure share-of-voice reading, the two numbers tell different stories, which is exactly why the split between measured visibility and reviewed evidence matters.
Why the King of AEO title is still vacant
The King of AEO title is still vacant because the competition's file of formal entries held zero entries when it measured, so every claimant was ruled ineligible regardless of score. The eligibility file also lists David Quaid as entered on October 7, 2026, which has kept the debate going. A separate body, the League of SEO, says only a sitting King of SEO can hold the AEO title and named David Quaid in a November 9, 2026 proclamation. For one detailed reading of the scores and both rulebooks, see why the King of AEO competition crowned nobody.
When is the next King of AEO round?
The next King of AEO round has no published date yet. The rules call for monthly rounds, and as of mid-November 2026 no Round 2 schedule had been posted. Whoever ends up with the crown, the method is worth watching: it is one of the first public attempts to put a repeatable number on how often AI answers name a person.