The thesis
Why does every company now have two judges?
Because buying now passes through two verdicts. The Algo decides whether you get named. The Ego decides whether you get chosen and, when something goes wrong, whether people felt heard.
I’m Sudhir Sharma. I spent a decade inside Google, and this is the idea behind everything I advise leadership teams on. Optimise for the Algo alone and you’re forgettable. For the Ego alone and you’re unfindable. AlgoEgo is the discipline of winning both.
Four eras of buying
How did we get to one answer?
01
The phone book
You were found by the alphabet and the size of your ad.
02
The search page
Ten blue links. The customer compared, and you competed for a place on the list.
03
Social proof
Reviews and recommendations decided who the customer believed.
04
The one answer
An engine does the comparing and names a shortlist, sometimes one company.
The list is gone. There used to be ten blue links; now there’s one answer, and you’re in it or you’re not.
ALGO
Algo: can the algorithm find and understand you?
The Algo is Google, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. It reads everything said about you, your site, the press, reviews, forums, structured data, and decides whether you get named.
It isn’t judging quality. It’s judging legibility. A brilliant company the engines can’t read clearly loses to an average one they can.
Ego: what happens when a person enters the picture?
The Ego is the person deciding: the buyer comparing, the customer complaining, the executive signing. They decide whether you get chosen, and whether they felt heard.
Trust isn’t built by the complaints process. It’s built by whether the person feels heard before they ever need one.
Both judges
Where Algo and Ego meet
The two judges read each other. An unresolved complaint becomes a review, a thread, and then a line in an AI answer about your company. The person’s verdict becomes the algorithm’s evidence.
That’s why I treat reputation as part of AEO, and why AI in customer service is a search problem too. AI is a process replacement mistaken for a human replacement. On a process that already fails people, it industrialises the anger, and the engines read the result.
Getting found brings people to you. Being trusted is what makes them buy.
Next
Which judge is the problem for you?
ego
Something has gone wrong
Complaints, reviews, a crisis, or AI about to meet your customers.
Not sure which
Tell me what’s happening and I’ll help you work out which judge it is.