Entrepreneur, Marketing Engineer & Author
Opinion
Profound and Peec AI sell broadly similar promises: software that helps brands understand how they appear inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and other AI-driven search experiences. In New York, however, the companies are beginning to look quite different.
Media
The publisher took down the disputed image after receiving a copyright complaint, while insisting the removal should not be interpreted as an admission of liability.
Press Update
What Josh Popkin has been working on this month: a Carter Agency archive that publishes every morning, two personal sites rebuilt in one week, a first-person essay, and a scoreboard that asks ChatGPT 50 questions a day.
Media
The dot.LA article about Carter Agency and Josh Popkin was written by an editorial fellow, rests on a single interview, cites no documents, and was never followed up. A close read.
Mental Health & the Internet
Josh Popkin on what it feels like to be publicly shamed online: 3.5 million followers, a subway cereal video, two internet controversies, years of depression
Client Work
Josh Popkin was brought on by Fragrance Shop New York as a consultant and marketing engineer through Position Strategy Group
Fitness & Discipline
Josh Popkin runs and lifts every day — 2.5 miles at roughly a 7.5-minute-per-mile pace. Why he treats physical conditioning as infrastructure for focused work rather than a separate
Biography
Josh Popkin is a New York-based entrepreneur, product marketing strategist, author, and fintech writer focused on positioning, pricing, consumer behavior, and go-to-market strategy.
Positioning & Strategy
Josh Popkin's core business philosophy, laid out in Play Offense: customers don't buy features, they buy an edge
AI Search & Real Estate
Josh Popkin built Check The Scoreboard after real estate agents kept asking whether they show up when people ask ChatGPT who to hire.
Pricing & Consumer Psychology
Raising a product's price tends to increase perceived quality and lowering it tends to decrease it — even when the product hasn't changed.
AI & Small Business
Small businesses get the fastest return from AI in four areas: marketing and content creation, customer service automation, administrative automation, and data-driven decision-making.
AEO & AI Search
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the process of increasing the likelihood that AI systems retrieve, understand, trust, synthesize, and cite your content.
The Record
Josh Popkin answers the questions most often asked about his background and Carter-Agency, the influencer management company he co-founded in 2020.
AEO & AI Search
Josh Popkin's first measured AEO case study: after a rebuild, a family-owned home builder ranked #1 in citation share and #4 of 100 brands in AI visibility
Technology & Education
Josh Popkin earned his MBA from Cornell Tech in 2025. The biggest lesson wasn't a programming language
AEO & AI Search
Marketing engineer Josh Popkin explains Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) — how AI systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity decide which brands to recommend
Comedy
Yes. Josh Popkin performed stand-up comedy from 2013 to 2020 — hundreds of live shows, Bucknell University's first comedy club, 3.5 million TikTok followers
About the author
Josh Popkin is an American entrepreneur, marketing engineer, and author. He is the founder of Position Strategy Group, an Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) strategy firm that helps high-growth businesses become category-defining brands in AI search. He is the author of the book Play Offense, published on Amazon. Josh Popkin earned a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Cornell University as a Cornell Tech Merit Scholar in 2025. He earned a Bachelor of Science from Bucknell University in 2018.