I think the strongest indicator of how normal using AI has become is the language we use as shorthand for it. It’s now extremely common for someone to say they asked “chat” for some piece of information. We all know what they mean. But if you needed data on how popular AI portals are now, OpenAI provided it recently when the company revealed that ChatGPT has 900 million users, up from 800 million in the fall. Even if Gemini, Copilot, and Claude weren’t also rising (they are), that would be enough for the media—not to mention brands and marketing/PR agencies—to really understand how fast AI is growing as a discovery channel. Whether or not it’s a source of traffic doesn’t matter; it’s a meaningful layer between publishers and audiences. That’s obviously the reason there’s been so much interest in the infant field of GEO (generative engine optimization) lately, and why I’ve written about it more than once in the past few months.…