King of AEO Contest
An entrant needs to know four dates, not a long project plan. This page lays them out in the order they happen and explains what actually occurs on each one, so a prospective entrant can work backwards from the deadline rather than discovering it too late.
On 4 October 2026 the competition ran a Round 0 baseline, measuring visibility across AI engines before any entrant had been accepted and before any eligibility gate had been applied to anyone. No title was awarded from Round 0, because scoring without eligibility checks is reference data, not a title round. The same day, the scoring framework was amended to add open-source contribution as a weighted component, and that change is dated and disclosed rather than applied retroactively in secret.
Round 1 entries close on 12 October 2026 at 23:59 AWST. That is the single hard deadline for anyone who wants to be eligible for the first title decision. There is no announced grace period, so an entrant working across time zones should convert that time to their own clock well before the day itself rather than on it.
Round 1 is measured on 13 October 2026, the day immediately after entries close. This is when the fixed set of prompts is run across the markets and engines used for every round, for every entrant who passed the eligibility check. Nothing an entrant does on measurement day itself changes their result; by this point the work is in gathering and submitting evidence, not in last-minute changes.
Results, including the first title decision, are published on 14 October 2026. If no entrant has passed every eligibility gate, the result for that round is a vacant title rather than an award to the highest scorer regardless of eligibility; the eligibility check is applied before the score is, not after.
Rounds then continue on a monthly cycle under the same published method, so missing Round 1 is not a final exclusion from the contest. An entrant can prepare evidence at a more comfortable pace for a later round, using this guide's checklist in the meantime.
The gap between the entry deadline and the measurement date is a single day, which is why the checklist on this site exists: there is effectively no time to gather evidence after entries close. The gap between the Round 0 baseline and the entry deadline is just over a week, and that is the realistic preparation window for a first-time entrant working from a cold start. Anyone starting from the submission-examples page on the day entries close is already too late to fix a weak link; the preparation needs to happen in that earlier window.
The four dates above describe Round 0 and Round 1 specifically. Later rounds follow the same monthly structure: an entry window, a measurement date immediately afterward, and a results date shortly after that, but the exact calendar dates move each month. Check the rules page for the current round's specific dates rather than assuming the October dates repeat unchanged.
Entries close on 12 October 2026 at 23:59 AWST. The entry form and the full rules are on the official competition site.
