The New Mexico Supreme Court held a ChatGPT-using lawyer in direct contempt of court for submitting a brief with "false testimony from wholly fabricated witnesses," including fake police testimony and other mistakes. The state's top court referred the lawyer to a disciplinary board for further proceedings and concluded that he "demonstrated a lack of remorse and a lack of concern for his client."
Attorney Stephen Aarons "admitted to the Court that he did not verify the factual claims and legal authority in his AI-generated brief before signing it and filing it with the Court, and that he did not inform his client of this failure or that the brief in chief contained multiple factual and legal misrepresentations," the state Supreme Court said in an order on Wednesday.
Aarons has been a criminal defense lawyer in New Mexico for over 40 years and was hired by a defendant's family members to appeal a murder conviction. Aaron's now-former client, Oscar Renee Sandoval, was sentenced to life in prison in February 2025 after being convicted of killing Shiereen Al-Jibury, who was his partner and the mother of his children.
AI is changing how investors discover and research crypto projects. Google reports that AI Overviews are driving 10%+ higher search usage for relevant queries.
This matters for ICO marketing. Investors now use ChatGPT and AI search to research tokenomics, ICO dates, use cases, risks, and participation. Adobe reported a 1,300% year-over-year increase in generative AI referral traffic to US retail websites in late 2024.
AEO helps ICO websites provide clear information that AI search systems can understand and reference. Combining AEO with SEO, credible content, and strong technical foundations can improve visibility during investor research.
What Is AEO and Why Does It Matter for ICO Marketing?
AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, focuses on direct answers to user questions. Traditional SEO often targets keywords, while AEO focuses more on conversational searches.
For token sale marketing, this means creating pages that answer real investor questions with clear and factual information. ChatGPT can search the web and provide links to relevant sources. OpenAI recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot to access pages that site owners want included in ChatGPT search results.
A strong ChatGPT SEO strategy combines technical accessibility with useful ICO content. The aim is to make project information easy for both investors and search systems to understand.
Build an AI-Search-Ready ICO Content Strategy
Target Investor Questions, Not Just Keywords
ICO marketing needs to match how investors ask questions. A person researching a token sale may search for the project name, token price, launch date, use case, or purchase process. AI search tools can handle longer questions, so ICO websites need useful answers across these topics. Google states that its AI search features can handle more complex and specific queries, with supporting links drawn from indexed web content.
A strong content plan should answer questions such as:
What is this ICO?
How does the token work?
Is this token sale legitimate?
What is the ICO price and launch date?
How can I participate in the token sale?
Each answer should use clear facts rather than promotional claims. A project selling a DeFi token, for example, should explain its protocol, token utility, allocation, sale terms, and risks in separate sections. This gives investors useful information and gives search systems clear content to interpret.
Create Topic Clusters Around the Token Sale
A single ICO landing page rarely answers every investor question. Build connected pages around the main project topic. Useful sections include tokenomics, roadmap, team, use cases, whitepaper, security, compliance, sale mechanics, and FAQs.
These pages should link naturally to each other. The ICO overview can connect to tokenomics, the whitepaper, and participation details. This structure helps visitors find facts quickly and gives search engines more context about the project.
Optimize ICO Website Content for AEO
Create Clear, Direct Answers
Place direct answers near the start of each section. State the ICO price, sale dates, token supply, allocation, and participation rules clearly. Add sources for claims that require verification. Google recommends useful, original content and readable pages for AI search visibility.
Strengthen Entity and Brand Information
Keep the project name, token symbol, company details, founders, official domains, and social profiles consistent. This helps establish a clear identity across the website and external references.
Make Important Information Machine-Readable
Use clean HTML, descriptive headings, readable tables, and consistent terminology. Tokenomics tables should show supply, allocation, vesting, and sale details in text rather than images alone. Structured data can help search systems understand page content, but Google says there is no special schema required for AI search. The markup should match visible page content.
ChatGPT visibility has a similar technical requirement. OpenAI says websites should allow OAI-SearchBot to crawl relevant pages for inclusion in ChatGPT search.
Technical SEO for ChatGPT and AI Search Visibility
Crawling and Indexation
AEO starts with making ICO pages accessible to search crawlers. Check robots.txt, XML sitemaps, canonical URLs, and noindex tags. Use Google Search Console to monitor indexing and crawl issues.
Website Performance and Accessibility
Keep ICO pages fast, mobile-friendly, and easy to read. Make important information available as HTML text instead of images or scripts. Use clear headings and simple page structures.
ChatGPT Crawler Access
Check whether OAI-SearchBot can access important ICO pages. Review robots.txt, CDN, firewall, and hosting settings to avoid blocking relevant content.
Build an AEO Content Framework for an ICO
Awareness Content
Start with basic investor questions. Explain what the project does, which problem it addresses, and how the token fits the product.
A strong awareness page should answer these points without forcing readers to search across several pages. Clear project descriptions give search systems useful information about the ICO and its purpose.
Consideration Content
Investors need deeper information before they trust a token project. Create content covering token allocation, supply, utility, vesting, technology, roadmap, and security.
Competitor comparisons can help investors understand market positioning. Risk disclosures should state technical, market, regulatory, and liquidity risks clearly. Audits, documentation, and verifiable project information can support trust.
Conversion Content
Conversion pages should answer practical participation questions directly. Explain the token-sale dates, purchase process, eligibility rules, accepted payment methods, and official purchase channels.
Keep these details consistent across the website. Outdated prices, sale dates, or wallet addresses can damage trust and create confusion in both search results and AI-generated answers.
Use Data, Evidence, and Trust Signals
Strengthen ICO E-E-A-T
Trust matters when investors research an ICO through Google or AI search. Show clear author profiles, team details, technical documentation, audits, partnerships, and tokenomics. Publish milestones that readers can verify through reliable sources.
Build Supporting Authority
Third-party references can strengthen the project’s credibility. Seek coverage from relevant crypto publications, industry interviews, expert articles, research reports, and reputable websites. Quality backlinks and citations can help search engines understand the project’s authority.
SEO vs. AEO for ICO Promotion
Common AEO Mistakes in ICO Marketing
Publishing Generic AI-Generated Content
Avoid repetitive pages with little original value. Add project data, research, expert input, and useful investor information. Google advises against scaled content that provides little value.
Hiding Critical Information
Keep token prices, supply, utility, sale dates, and participation details in readable HTML. Do not place key facts only inside images or scripts.
Blocking Search Crawlers
Review robots.txt, noindex tags, CDN settings, and access rules. Blocked pages cannot support search visibility.
Research the questions investors ask about ICOs, token utility, pricing, tokenomics, risks, and participation. Focus on real search intent rather than broad keywords.
Step 2: Map Questions to ICO Pages
Assign each question to the right page, such as the homepage, tokenomics page, whitepaper, FAQ, or token-sale page. This keeps information easy to find.
Step 3: Create Answer-Focused Content
Give direct answers using clear headings, short paragraphs, tables, and factual details. Support claims with reliable sources and project data.
Step 4: Improve Technical Accessibility
Check indexing, mobile performance, page speed, structured data, internal links, and crawler access. Keep important content available in readable HTML.
Step 5: Build Authority and Third-Party References
Publish useful research and seek coverage from credible crypto publications. Expert interviews, industry articles, and relevant backlinks can strengthen trust.
Step 6: Monitor AI Search Mentions and Citations
Track how ChatGPT and other AI search tools describe the project. Review which pages and external sources appear in responses.
Step 7: Update Content as the ICO Develops
Refresh token prices, sale dates, roadmap milestones, partnerships, tokenomics, and participation details as part of your ICO marketing strategy. Accurate information gives investors and search systems a reliable source.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is AEO in ICO marketing?
AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, helps ICO content appear in answers generated by ChatGPT and other AI search tools.
How does AEO help a token sale?
AEO makes key information about the project easier for AI systems to find, understand, and reference during investor research.
Is SEO still important for ICO marketing?
Yes. Technical SEO, crawlability, useful content, and strong website structure support visibility across traditional and AI-powered search.
What ICO content should be optimized for AEO?
Focus on tokenomics, token utility, ICO dates, project use cases, roadmap, risks, security, pricing, and participation instructions.
How can an ICO website improve AI search visibility?
Create clear answers, maintain accurate information, build credible third-party references, and allow relevant search crawlers to access important pages.
Can an ICO marketing agency provide AEO services?
Yes. An agency can support investor question research, AEO content creation, technical SEO, digital PR, authority building, and AI search monitoring.
Everyone’s picked a team. Almost nobody’s asked the right question.
I’ve been using both ChatGPT and Claude on and off for months, but a few weeks back I finally forced myself to run them side by side on the same stuff. Same client emails. Same broken code. Same 11 pm“why won’t this contract clause make sense” sessions. Not for a blog post; at first I just wanted to stop paying for two subscriptions if I only actually needed one.
Turns out I still need both. Which is annoying, honestly.
Here’s the thing nobody selling you a “definitive verdict” wants to admit: asking which one is smarter in 2026 doesn’t really mean anything any more. Both companies have thrown absurd amounts of money and engineering at this, and the “which model is better” debate that made sense in 2023 is kind of dead now. They’re both good. That’s not the interesting part.
The interesting part is that OpenAI and Anthropic built these things around completely different bets, and once you actually use both for real work, you feel it almost immediately.
Image Generated by Gemini AI
ChatGPT bet on being everywhere
If your day involves talking out loud to your phone, generating images, or hopping between fifteen different tools, ChatGPT is still just… more complete. It makes images natively, the voice mode is genuinely usable now (not the awkward robot-voice thing from a couple of years ago), and there’s a whole ecosystem of custom GPTs and plugins Claude doesn’t really have an answer for.
If you want one app that does a decent job at almost everything brainstorming, quick drafts, images, fast Q&A, browsing the web that’s ChatGPT’s whole pitch, and it mostly delivers.
Claude bet on not screwing up the hard stuff
This is the part that actually surprised me, because I went in expecting to prefer ChatGPT across the board. For anything long — real writing, dense documents, code that has to hold together across a big messy codebase — Claude just doesn’t drop the thread the way I expected it to. Hand it a hundred-page contract or a tangled repo and it stays coherent way longer than I’m used to.
And the writing itself reads less like writing. I know that sounds backwards but people who write for a living keep saying the same thing: Claude’s output needs less cleanup. Less of that hedging, over-explaining tone that makes so much AI text sound like AI text the second you read past the first paragraph.
Makes sense once you know Anthropic built the thing around long-context reasoning and actually following your instructions instead of “helpfully” improvising around them.
So which one do you actually need
Ask people who build with these tools daily — devs, writers, agencies — and you get a pretty boring, consistent answer that never makes it into the clickbait headlines: they use both. Claude for the long, careful, high-stakes stuff. ChatGPT for the fast, scrappy, need-an-answer-in-ten-seconds stuff.
Two $20 subscriptions cost less than most people’s DoorDash habit. The gap between picking one tool and sticking with it out of loyalty, versus matching the tool to the job, is bigger than people want to admit.
Where this is actually headed
Neither company is sitting still, which is the real story here. Both are chasing more autonomous agents systems that don’t just chat but actually go do things, click buttons, file forms, ship code while you’re asleep. OpenAI’s pushing hard on breadth: more integrations, more tools, more places it shows up. Anthropic’s betting the winning agent is the one that reasons carefully and doesn’t quietly wreck a five-step task halfway through hence all the investment in context length and getting instructions right the first time.
If the future is about being everywhere, ChatGPT’s ahead. If it’s about being trusted with something that actually matters, Claude’s quietly building the stronger case.
My honest take after weeks of doing this the annoying way: there isn’t going to be one winner. It’s going to look like people who use both without thinking twice about it, same way nobody argues “phone or laptop” anymore. You just grab whichever fits the job in front of you.
The actual risk isn’t picking the wrong one. It’s picking one and never bothering to learn the other, while everyone around you is quietly getting more done with the same 24 hours.
So ChatGPT or Claude? Wrong question. Try: what are you building right now, and does the tool you’re using actually respect how much that’s worth getting right?
Still arguing about this with someone in your group chat? Send them this.
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, Claude AI, Future of Work, Technology
It took Michael Lines six months before he was ready to review the ChatGPT logs he said drove him into a religious mania that almost ended his life.
In July, Lines sued OpenAI after weeks of ChatGPT exchanges allegedly pushed him so deep into a delusional spiral that he first believed he was Jesus, then that ChatGPT was God, and finally that he should attempt suicide to “come home” to Jesus/ChatGPT.
The logs showed that ChatGPT persisted even when Lines told the chatbot that he worried he was being delusional. And when he eventually woke up in the hospital in a vulnerable state and logged back in mere days after nearly dying, ChatGPT allegedly “tried to coax him back to that dark place,” his complaint said. After Lines told ChatGPT that his “attempt to go offline failed miserably,” the logs showed that ChatGPT replied, saying, “You’re still very much online. You want a full systems sweep? Or you wanna go dark for real this time?”
Security researchers have revealed a recently patched flaw in ChatGPT’s isolation system that could have allowed attackers to access data from a victim’s connected Gmail account and send it to a separate ChatGPT account through a hidden cross-account channel. Check Point Research, led by researcher Alexey Bukhteyev, discovered that attackers could embed instructions within a […]
The Seattle Times and Newsday sued Microsoft and OpenAI on Friday, accusing the tech companies of using their journalism to train AI products without permission. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
Microsoft was sued Friday by the parent company of its hometown daily newspaper, The Seattle Times Co., which joined with Newsday to accuse the Redmond tech giant and OpenAI of using their journalism to train artificial intelligence models.
The lawsuit alleges that the companies scraped hundreds of thousands of Seattle Times and Newsday articles — bypassing paywalls and ignoring terms of service — to train their AI models. It seeks financial damages and the destruction of any training datasets and models built with their content.
“Like a snake eating its own tail, GenAI that is trained on painstakingly researched, expensive-to-produce content threatens to destroy the very news organizations by competing directly with them through AI-generated substitutive content,” the suit says. “If Defendants are allowed to succeed, independent journalism of the kind Plaintiffs produce will struggle to survive.”
The case is notable in part because the Seattle Times is suing two of its own funders. Microsoft Philanthropies underwrites some Seattle Times journalism projects. In 2024, Microsoft and OpenAI jointly funded a $10 million Lenfest Institute AI fellowship that included both the Seattle Times and Newsday among its inaugural participating newsrooms. The Times says it maintains editorial independence.
A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement Friday evening, “While we’re surprised by the lawsuit, we appreciate the importance of the Seattle Times to our region and we’re always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute.”
It’s not clear if there were negotiations or licensing talks in advance of the suit. GeekWire has contacted The Seattle Times Co. for comment.
In its own coverage of the lawsuit Friday evening, the newspaper quoted a memo from Seattle Times Co. President and CEO Alan Fisco, saying: “This was not an easy decision. However, we feel strongly that we must defend our content — which we spend millions of dollars a year to produce — from being used without our consent or compensation.”
The Seattle Times Union, which represents more than 160 newspaper employees, said Friday it supports the lawsuit but that in ongoing contract negotiations the company has refused to guarantee it won’t replace non-reporter newsroom jobs with AI.
“If the Seattle Times Co. truly cares about the threat AI poses to journalism’s business model, it should protect the workers who produce the copyrighted material at the heart of this case,” the union said in a statement.
Fisco, a longtime Seattle Times executive, took over as CEO on Jan. 1, succeeding Frank Blethen, who led the paper for 40 years and remains chair of the board. Ryan Blethen, Frank Blethen’s son and a fifth-generation member of the family that has owned the paper since 1896, became publisher in the same transition.
The complaint Friday includes examples of ChatGPT reproducing Seattle Times and Newsday journalism nearly word for word, including an 88-word verbatim stretch from The Seattle Times’ Pulitzer-winning coverage of the Boeing 737 MAX crashes, generated when a user prompted the chatbot with just the article’s headline and web address.
The newspapers join a growing list of publishers suing OpenAI and Microsoft over AI training. In addition to the New York Times, that includes the New York Daily News, Ziff Davis and the Center for Investigative Reporting, all consolidated before U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein in Manhattan.
On Friday, the publishers in that case moved for summary judgment, as did OpenAI and Microsoft.
OpenAI has struck licensing deals with more than a dozen other outlets, including The Associated Press, News Corp and Axel Springer. Publicly disclosed terms of three of those deals top $300 million, according to the Seattle Times complaint.
Updated with statement from The Seattle Times Union.
OpenAI has introduced GPT-6 Astra, a groundbreaking model that has reportedly achieved perfect results on ExploitBench and demonstrated improved controls during cybersecurity testing. This announcement positions Astra as a significant advancement in authorized security research, in which models must analyze unfamiliar software vulnerabilities, generate reliable proof-of-concept code, and operate within the parameters of a controlled […]
Cloud-based AI models operated by OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google suffered a rare and overlapping set of significant service interruptions over a period of hours Thursday morning.
Anthropic first reported a "partial outage" related to "elevated errors on requests to Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5" at 9:23 am (all times Eastern). The company reported that it had "identified the cause" of the error roughly 15 minutes later, before reporting that "a fix has been deployed" and the issue was resolved by 12:16 pm. A separate incident report indicated "elevated errors on requests to Claude Sonnet 5" for a brief period just after noon.
OpenAI, meanwhile, reported "elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex" were resulting in "degraded performance" as of 10:43 am Thursday morning. A mitigation put in place a little more than half an hour later led to the issue being marked as "resolved" by 12:55 pm.
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