Author
Alex Nazarov
Marketing Director, iSonic.ai
Alex leads marketing at iSonic — advertising, branding and user growth — and writes the iSonic blog on how AI assistants choose, cite and credit their sources.
Background
From ranking to being cited.
Alex came to AI through search. He spent his career in SEO and digital growth, learning what makes a page discoverable, trustworthy and worth ranking — technical structure, content architecture, and the slow work of earning authority.
When AI assistants started answering the questions people used to type into a search box, the rules of discovery changed. Ranking stopped being the finish line. Being the source inside the answer became the thing worth optimising for, and the people who made the underlying work were suddenly the least visible part of the system. That shift is what he now works on at iSonic.
The argument
AI trained on AI is slop.
Alex's position is that the AI ecosystem runs on human creators, and quietly depends on them. Models are only as good as what they learn from. When AI trains on AI-generated output, quality degrades with every pass — the result is a closed loop of recycled, averaged, increasingly useless content.
What breaks that loop is original work: real expertise, real reporting, real perspective, made by people who know something firsthand. That's the raw material the whole system depends on.
Which makes the incentive problem the real problem. If creators can't earn from work that AI absorbs, they stop making it, and the ecosystem degrades along with them. Alex argues for the other path: attribution, licensing and payment built into how AI reaches content, so the people producing high-quality work have a reason to keep producing it.
What he writes about
Three threads.
Generative engine optimization
How ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity select sources, and what creators and brands can do about it.
Creator rights
Attribution, licensing and compensation in a market that was built on scraping first and asking later.
Visibility and growth
Staying findable, credited and paid as discovery moves from a list of links into the answer itself.
Articles
On the iSonic blog
Role
Marketing Director, iSonicFocus
SEO · GEO · Creator rights · GrowthElsewhere
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