The Spin Sucks Podcast with Gini Dietrich

A new report says earned media is disrupting the PESO Model® for AI discoverability—and a second survey, published the same month, says paid media matters most. They can't both be right, and Gini Dietrich argues neither question is. In this week’s Spin Sucks episode, she walks through what both surveys found, why "which media type matters most" measures who you asked instead of what works, and the finding everyone should be talking about: a 28-point confidence gap between agencies and brands that comes down to one word—measurement.

Read the post: http://spinsucks.com/communication/ai-peso-model-proof

PESO Model Diagnostic: https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/

PESO Model Certification: https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/

Spin Sucks Community: https://spinsucks.com/community

D S Simon report: https://www.dssimon.com/earned-media-in-the-ai-era-report/

Sword and the Script survey: https://www.swordandthescript.com/2026/08/ai-visibility-survey/

In this week’s Spin Sucks podcast episode, Gini Dietrich explains why the AI persona you built last year just got promoted to referee, the only two signals it checks before it vouches for you, and the four moves to make before someone in your building tries to solve "the AI problem" with a bigger ad budget.

Read the article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/ai-agents-gatekeepers/

Take the free PESO Model Diagnostic®: https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/

PESO Model Certification®: https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/

AI Visibility Is a PESO Model Problem: https://spinsucks.com/communication/ai-visibility-peso-model/

Meet Your New Buyer Persona: https://spinsucks.com/communication/meet-your-new-buyer-persona/

Everyone is writing the same article about AI visibility: it's a new discipline, and—what luck!—they sell the thing that fixes it. Nope. AI systems reward probability, not popularity, and probability gets built through the integrated program communicators have been running for more than a decade: the PESO Model®.

In this week’s Spin Sucks podcast episode, Gini Dietrich breaks down the specific job each media type does in the evidence base LLMs actually score—and the claims-versus-corroboration audit to run with your team this week.

Links:

Full article: https://spinsucks.com/communication//ai-visbility-peso-model

Marketing Dive article: https://www.marketingdive.com/news/why-unpaid-media-is-now-essential-to-ai-visibility/822485/ Free PESO Model® Diagnostic: https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/

PESO Model® Certification: https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/

Everyone wants the AI visibility tool with the free trial and the dashboard. We don't have one to sell you, and neither does anyone else—because if AI isn't recommending your brand, that's usually a trust problem wearing a tooling costume.

In this week’s Spin Sucks podcast episode, Gini Dietrich makes the case that trust is a supply chain with stations you cannot skip, and she walks through the three shortcuts that failed in public last year. You'll also learn why getting cited by an AI engine isn't the finish line, and how to tell an awareness problem from a belief problem.

Read the full article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/ai-visibility-trust/

Links: Take the free PESO Model® Diagnostic: https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/ PESO Model® Certification: https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/

The full eight-week arc, from the CMO operating system post through the Duolingo diagnostic, is at spinsucks.com

Duolingo built the internet's favorite brand on rented land—the best shared media engine on the planet, run through one green owl on platforms it doesn't control. In this month's PESO Model® Diagnostic, Gini Dietrich looks at what the legend leaves out: an owned media record too thin to defend the brand when the 2025 "AI-first" backlash hit. You'll learn why Duo's chaos is actually disciplined character work, why AI engines ignore your funniest channel and cite your machine-readable record instead, and the three fixes that apply to any brand being told to "just go viral."

Read the full article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/duolingo-peso-model-diagnostic/

Links: Take the free PESO Model® Diagnostic: https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/ PESO Model® Certification: https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/

The series so far: Budweiser, Liquid Death, Peppa Pig, and HubSpot at spinsucks.com