More and more customers ask AI before they pick a place to go. Many businesses assume that keeping their search ranking is enough. Whether AI reads you, names you and describes you correctly is a different matter.

TK Lin (林毅祥) runs Washin Cat Village, a small inn in Chiba, Japan. For 220 days TK Lin put all the AEO, GEO, SEO, LLMO and AIO knowledge and literature that could be found to the test on the author's own website, and turned the results into "IDAEO: Market Strategy for the AI Era". Since October 26, 2026, the book has been free in Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, English and Japanese.

Highlights

- Free book: four languages; web edition, PDF, mobile PDF (A5) and EPUB, all free to download.
- Commercial use allowed: CC BY 4.0. Credit the source and you can share, teach, adapt and use it commercially. No request needed, and it does not expire. Register your use for free by December 31, 2026 to be told when a new edition comes out.
- First-hand data: requests to the author's website grew from 53 on day one (March 3, 2026) to 635,000 by the end of March, 21.4 million by the end of June, 99.15 million by the end of September and 105.5 million cumulative by October 8 (including AI, search engines and automated bots). The book's conclusions are checked against this data.
- Revised monthly: first edition October 11, 2026; 1st edition, 11th revision as of October 25. It will keep being updated each month with new data.

Who it is for

- Shop owners who want to know what to do first now that customers ask AI.
- Marketers who want one method that runs from audiences and the customer journey to measurement and assessment.
- Researchers who want the sources, scope and units of the data and the theoretical basis.
- Beginners with no marketing or website background, who can read it one stop at a time.

The book maps a reading path for each of these four readers. Nine chapters and 36 figures; each chapter answers one question, and every claim comes with its reason.

Not for: anyone looking for a trick to get AI to recommend them. The book is about getting AI to understand you, trust you and describe you correctly, and then checking the results with numbers. There is no secret that guarantees a ranking.

Why TK Lin wrote it, and why it is free

In the preface, the author writes: "This is the story of a small inn in Japan, Washin Cat Village, trying to use AI to make itself known around the world, amid the anxiety of the AI era. I am also sharing these 220 days of hands-on experience with every small and medium-sized business working hard to make its own way."

Along the way TK Lin also built an AEO checker (aeo.washinmura.jp, now aeo.idaeo.ai). In the preface, the author thanks the small and medium-sized businesses in Taiwan and Japan that used these tools, and says they are the reason the author decided to put everything learned into a book.

Where the numbers come from, and their limits

- The 105.5 million figure is the request count recorded by Cloudflare (the CDN in front of the websites), not the author's own estimate. The Cloudflare dashboard is not public, so outsiders cannot check it directly.
- These are platform-scale figures and cannot be compared directly with a single merchant's website.
- Requests before August 24 may include duplicates.
- 2.82 million of them were made by the site's own Cloudflare AI Search; the book says these will be deducted in the next monthly update.
- A visit by AI to read content does not mean it has been used for training or indexed.

The book states these limits. Chapter 3, "Measurement Sources and the AI Black Box", lists the source, scope and unit of each number.

Press images (CC BY 4.0; credit the source)

- Main image: the cover and the "free book" announcement image
- Overview figure: on the book page

Media and partnerships

- Interviews with the author are welcome: how AI search is changing marketing for small businesses, the 220-day test, and publishing free in four languages.
- Courses, teaching materials and remixes based on the book are welcome. CC BY 4.0; just credit the source.

Read and download for free

- English: https://km.idaeo.ai/idaeo/textbook?lang=en&utm_source=prfree&utm_medium=press&utm_campaign=free-test-20261101&utm_content=prfree-en
(繁體中文: https://km.idaeo.ai/idaeo/textbook?utm_source=prfree&utm_medium=press&utm_campaign=free-test-20261101&utm_content=prfree-en / 日本語: https://km.idaeo.ai/idaeo/textbook?lang=ja&utm_source=prfree&utm_medium=press&utm_campaign=free-test-20261101&utm_content=prfree-en / 简体中文: https://km.idaeo.ai/idaeo/textbook?lang=zh-Hans&utm_source=prfree&utm_medium=press&utm_campaign=free-test-20261101&utm_content=prfree-en)
- Register your use for free (remix, teaching, commercial): https://km.idaeo.ai/idaeo/participate?lang=en&utm_source=prfree&utm_medium=press&utm_campaign=free-test-20261101&utm_content=prfree-en#pt-license

How to credit: TK Lin, "IDAEO: Market Strategy for the AI Era", CC BY 4.0, https://km.idaeo.ai/idaeo/textbook?lang=en&utm_source=prfree&utm_medium=press&utm_campaign=free-test-20261101&utm_content=prfree-en

About the author

TK Lin (林毅祥) is a serial entrepreneur. In 2008, TK Lin founded ADPartner Asia Pacific Digital Advertising Group, a social media advertising agency. In 2016, TK Lin founded Botpartner, an AI chatbot company, in Paris. In 2020, TK Lin founded Washinmura in Chiba, Japan. In 2026, TK Lin founded IDAEO. (From the author profile in the book.)

About IDAEO

IDAEO (https://idaeo.ai) is a platform for citation-grade data that AI can cite, with a free website check. The book is published by Washin Co., Ltd. (IDAEO; Japan corporate number 8011401020677).

Contact: [email protected]