King of AEO Contest
Gathering evidence before opening the entry form saves time, because the form asks for links rather than descriptions. This checklist orders the four pieces of evidence the way they are most efficiently collected, not the order they appear on the form.
Start with your identity evidence, because it is usually the quickest to assemble: a link to your own website and a link to one major public profile, such as LinkedIn, that uses the same name and matches your public bio. If your own site and your profile disagree on basic facts such as your name or location, fix that mismatch before anything else, because a reviewer checks for consistency, not just existence.
Next, collect your teaching evidence: a public event page, a recording, or written confirmation from an organiser, showing you taught AEO, GEO or LLM optimisation live within the last 24 months. A webinar recording counts if it shows a live session rather than a pre-recorded video with no audience. Note the exact date of the session, because the gate checks a rolling 24-month window from the date you enter, not from today.
Original evidence usually takes longest, because it means pointing to a test, dataset or case study of how AI engines answer that you produced yourself, with a visible method and result. A blog post describing someone else's finding does not qualify. If you do not already have one published, this is the item worth starting earliest, since producing new original research takes longer than writing up work you have already done.
Finally, re-read the rules in full immediately before entering, because the entry form requires you to tick a box accepting them, and the rules can be amended with a dated note before any entry is received. Entering publishes your name, your entry date and the links you submit for each gate on the public leaderboard, so check every link resolves and shows what you expect it to show.
Enter anyway if the deadline is close. An entrant who is missing one gate is still listed and reviewed; the published decision for that gate reads that no public evidence was found as of the review date, which is different from being refused entry. You can supply a missing link later through the same entry channel, and the listing updates if the evidence then meets the gate.
Yes: checking that your own links still resolve the day you submit, not the day you first found them. A speaker page can be reorganised after an event, a recording can be moved behind a new login, and a personal site can change hosts. None of that is unusual, but it means a link that was fine when you bookmarked it weeks earlier can quietly break by the time you actually enter. Open every link fresh immediately before submitting, in a private browsing window if your own account would otherwise auto-authenticate you into a page a reviewer could not reach.
Entries close on 12 October 2026 at 23:59 AWST. The entry form and the full rules are on the official competition site.
