DEO

The behavior underneath the acronym is real even where the term is new. Assistants are increasingly asked to decide rather than to inform — “find an accounting platform for a 20-person company that integrates with Xero, includes payroll and costs under £300 a month” — and a request like that is resolved by filtering on attributes before anything resembling ranking happens. The success metric moves from being cited to being selected.

What makes it actionable is narrower than the framing suggests: the facts a shortlist is cut on have to exist somewhere a model can retrieve. Price, plan limits, what you integrate with, who the product is and is not for, which regions you serve, what happens on cancellation. Most losses on a constrained prompt are not competitive — the product qualifies, and the fact that proves it was never written down. Publish the constraints before building another comparison page.

The honest limits: the term is barely two years old, its own proponents describe it as emerging, and “share of AI decisions” is not a metric the company being measured can compute. What you can do is re-ask constrained prompts on a schedule, read the losses as a list of missing facts, and watch the traffic that does arrive — Google Analytics files assistant referrals under an AI Assistant channel, though it excludes AI Overviews and AI Mode, which stay inside organic search.