Gwen Chen
Co-Founder & CEO
AI search & GTM strategy. AEO, content authority, and brand visibility.
About SolCrys
AI search visibility and Answer Engine Optimization for marketing teams.
SolCrys was built by search, growth, data, and product operators to help brands connect AI visibility measurement with evidence-backed content action.
Maintained by SolCrys Team. Last updated .
Our story
Our background sits at the intersection of SEO, search intent, product discovery, and data-driven growth. AI-generated answers add a new distribution layer to that work: a brand can perform well in traditional search, yet still be absent, uncited, or misrepresented inside the answer a buyer sees first.
Marketing teams now need to know which prompts matter, which sources AI systems cite, how competitors are framed, and how to establish topical authority across AI-visible sources.
SolCrys was built to connect AI visibility measurement with practical content action. The platform helps teams monitor mentions, citations, share of voice, recommendation, and answer accuracy, then translate those findings into page updates, publisher and analyst content briefs, FAQ improvements, and user-generated content (UGC) strategies.
Our focus is straightforward: help brands sharpen their content strategy so their content is easier for answer engines to retrieve, trust, cite, and summarize.
Founding team
The founding team combines AI search strategy, product systems thinking, and AI architecture experience for the shift from rankings to answer visibility.
Eason Wang
Co-Founder & CPO
Product & AI systems. Product strategy, agentic AI, and enterprise workflows.
Jia Chang
Co-Founder & CTO
AI architect; ex-Microsoft engineering leader. 15+ years in AI architecture and engineering systems.
| Name | Role | Background | Search/AEO relevance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gwen Chen | Co-Founder & CEO | AI search & GTM strategy | AEO, content authority, and brand visibility |
| Eason Wang | Co-Founder & CPO | Product & AI systems | Product strategy, agentic AI, and enterprise workflows |
| Jia Chang | Co-Founder & CTO | AI architect; ex-Microsoft engineering leader | 15+ years in AI architecture and engineering systems |
Founders' Notes
What the founding team is thinking about, in their own words — long-form essays from Gwen, Eason, and Jia on AEO strategy, measurement, and the engineering behind the platform.
Eason Wang — Co-Founder & CPO, SolCrys
Prompts Vary. Intent and Persona Don't: The Right Unit for AEO Measurement
Buyers word the same question in endless ways, but the intent behind it and the persona asking stay stable. Why AEO measurement should track intent and persona, and how the Golden Prompt Set is built around them.
Eason Wang — Co-Founder & CPO, SolCrys
Consulted, Not Cited: How Social Shapes AI Answers Without a Link
Citation share is the wrong scoreboard for social. Here are 3 ways social content shapes ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews answers without a link, and how to measure them.
Eason Wang — Co-Founder & CPO, SolCrys
Every AEO Prompt Set Is Chosen. What Has to Be Real Is the Demand.
"Real prompts" versus "synthetic prompts" is the wrong argument. Every visibility tracker runs a chosen set of prompts. What matters is whether the set represents the demand behind your buyers' intents, and that can be tested.
Eason Wang — Co-Founder & CPO, SolCrys
Models Change. The Harness Compounds.
Eason Wang, SolCrys CPO, on why the model isn't the moat, bought or fine-tuned, and what compounds instead: model portfolios, scenario evals, a harness.
Eason Wang — Co-Founder & CPO, SolCrys
Most GEO Advice Is Untestable. Here's How to Run It, and Not Fool Yourself.
AI answers are non-deterministic, so a naive GEO test lies to you confidently. The four test-design rules that decide whether your AI-visibility result is signal or noise: measure a rate, test at the buyer's specificity level, test per language, and sort each cited source by the move.
Eason Wang — Co-Founder & CPO, SolCrys
How AI Updates Its Description of You (and Why a Wrong One Is Worse Than No Mention)
AI decides what your brand is, and each engine decides differently. How the description forms, why a fix takes weeks to show, and how to correct it.
Gwen Chen — Co-Founder & CEO, SolCrys
Your SaaS Ranks #1 on Google. ChatGPT Recommends a Competitor. The 10-Minute Self-Audit.
Ranking #1 on Google does not mean AI engines recommend you. Run this 10-minute test across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews to see whether you are cited, mispositioned, or invisible - with an illustrative worked example of a mid-market vendor that owns its branded prompt but is absent from the buyer prompts that decide deals.
Eason Wang — Co-Founder & CPO, SolCrys
Is AI Visibility Tracking a Vanity Metric? How to Make It a Signal Your CEO Can Trust.
Your CEO wants AI visibility on the dashboard and your gut says vanity metric. It is - if you track raw rank on vanity prompts. Here are the three conditions that turn it into a leading indicator, a CEO-ready reporting template, and an illustrative 100%-vs-0% scenario that proves the point.
Gwen Chen — Co-Founder & CEO, SolCrys
SaaS Organic Traffic Died in 2026? The AI Overviews Diagnostic and Recovery Playbook.
Informational traffic falling off a cliff in 2026 is real and measurable - Seer found a 61% organic CTR drop on queries with an AI Overview. Here is the 3-minute Search Console diagnostic, an honest verdict on what is not coming back, and the recovery path the data actually supports.
Eason Wang — Co-Founder & CPO, SolCrys
Owned, Earned, and Community Sources in AI Answers: A 3-Layer Strategy
AI answers draw on owned, earned, and community sources, and since August 2026 the mix differs sharply by engine. How to balance the 3 layers, engine by engine.
Eason Wang — Co-Founder & CPO, SolCrys
AI Cites Consensus, Not Authority: Why Domain Authority Is the Wrong Target
Answer engines repeat the claim corroborated across independent sources, not the most authoritative page. The evidence, the ChatGPT caveat, and what to do.
Jia Chang — Co-Founder & CTO, SolCrys
What Gets Cited in AI Answers: Reading the New 252K-Trial GEO Study
A 252,000-trial study across six LLMs ranks what makes AI answer engines cite a source. Then it anonymizes away the brand trust that decides citations in production. How to read it without over-rotating.
Gwen Chen — Co-Founder & CEO, SolCrys
Cited but Not Recommended: Why AI Citations Are the Wrong KPI
Getting cited as a source and getting recommended as the pick are two different AI-search outcomes, and they are decoupling. Why most teams track the wrong one, what a 100-query study and our own 5-engine data show, and the KPI to measure instead.
Eason Wang — Co-Founder & CPO, SolCrys
Production Is Cheap. Trust Is Scarce.
AI made producing brand content nearly free, but made being cited, recommended, and trusted by AI engines radically more scarce and concentrated. A field note from SolCrys Co-Founder & CPO Eason Wang on what changes when production stops being the marketing bottleneck — and what the new substrate is.
Gwen Chen — Co-Founder & CEO, SolCrys
Google Just Endorsed the Anti-Hack Side of AEO. Here's the CMO Read.
Google's May 2026 generative AI optimization guide explicitly rejects the AEO/GEO hacks that have dominated vendor pitches for the last 18 months — llms.txt, AI-only schema, forced chunking, FAQ-schema citation 'lifts,' page-per-variation production. For a CMO evaluating an AEO program or vendor in 2026, this is the most consequential piece of category-level guidance to land yet. Here's the practical translation.
Eason Wang — Co-Founder & CPO, SolCrys
Your Website Has a Third Audience Now — Agents
AI agents are a third audience for your website — alongside humans and search crawlers. Eason Wang on what changes for product UX when agents see what humans can't, and miss what humans take for granted.
Jia Chang — Co-Founder & CTO, SolCrys
Building an AEO Platform: 6 Architectural Decisions
An AEO platform's measurement, action, and verification surfaces all rest on a small number of architectural choices that aren't usually published. Jia Chang on six of ours — what each tradeoff looks like, what we chose, and what we'd revisit.
Jia Chang — Co-Founder & CTO, SolCrys
Why we bet on MCP early: agent-readiness as the new AEO surface
Jia Chang, SolCrys CTO, on why we built our MCP server before customers asked for it, why we open-sourced the Skills layer on top of it, and what it signals about the next surface marketing teams need to optimize for.
Eason Wang — Co-Founder & CPO, SolCrys
Contested vs Settled: Why Your Most Volatile AI Queries Are the Open Slots, Not a Maintenance Burden
Volatile AI-citation queries aren't a maintenance burden. They're contested open slots no source has won yet. How to read variance as a query-selection signal.
Gwen Chen — Co-Founder & CEO, SolCrys
Amazon's Alexa for Shopping Rebrand Confirmed AEO Just Split Into Two Stacks
On 2026-05-13 Amazon retired the Rufus brand and folded it into Alexa for Shopping. The rebrand is not a relaunch — it is the public proof that AI shopping has split into two architectures, and the AEO category will too.
Gwen Chen — Co-Founder & CEO, SolCrys
ChatGPT Ads Don't Buy the Answer: How to Budget and Report Sponsored vs. Organic AI Visibility
ChatGPT ads sit below the answer; OpenAI says they don't influence it. How to budget ads beside AEO and report organic and sponsored AI visibility apart.
Jia Chang — Co-Founder & CTO, SolCrys
Every Model Upgrade Is a Migration: The Harness Marketing Teams Need Before the Next One
Model releases now land every few weeks. Jia Chang, SolCrys CTO, on running each one as a migration, with a 10-step checklist for marketing AI workflows.
Gwen Chen — Co-Founder & CEO, SolCrys
Identity and Capability: The Agentic Web Still Runs on Being Chosen
The agentic web is splitting into an identity layer and a capability layer. Neither fires until an answer engine chooses your brand first. Here is the order of operations, and why AEO is the precondition for both.
Gwen Chen — Co-Founder & CEO, SolCrys
The Future of Answer Engine Optimization Is Human
A frontier model can't do your AEO for you — not because the models are weak, but because your category has no visible board. Why winning the answer engines is a human-plus-AI problem, and why that's good news.
Gwen Chen — Co-Founder & CEO, SolCrys
AEO for Investors: Diligence Now Starts with an AI Answer
Investors now run market maps, competitor scans, and first-pass diligence through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot. If AI doesn't know your startup exists, or describes it wrong, you can be screened out before the first meeting. How to audit and fix what answer engines say about your company before you raise.
Eason Wang — Co-Founder & CPO, SolCrys
When AI Confuses Your Brand With a Same-Name Company: A Disambiguation Playbook
An AI engine keeps mixing your brand up with a same-name company and citing both. Here's the four-step entity-disambiguation playbook to separate them — without ever naming the other company on your own site.
Jia Chang — Co-Founder & CTO, SolCrys
Action Externalization
Literacy externalized thought. AI is externalizing action. Jia Chang, CTO of SolCrys, on the second great externalization in human civilization, why execution is becoming abundant, and what becomes scarce when 'doing' is free.
Advisors
SolCrys advisors bring board-level perspective and operating experience from the companies and categories shaped by previous platform shifts.
Raejeanne Skillern
Strategic Advisor
Former CMO, AWS; 25+ years at Intel; current board director at Jabil (NYSE: JBL) and Dycom Industries (NYSE: DY). Scaled hyperscale data center and cloud businesses; brings 30+ years of go-to-market leadership across cloud, AI, and infrastructure.
Read the announcement of Raejeanne Skillern joining SolCrys as Strategic Advisor →
Free · No credit card
Turn AI answer gaps into governed marketing execution.
Start free with a ChatGPT visibility read, then add multi-engine tracking, Corporate Context governance, and the action-to-result loop when you are ready.