Will AI Recommend You?
Will AI recommend your business, or your competitor's? Will AI Recommend You? is the podcast about AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation): how UK businesses get named by ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity when a buyer asks who to use.
Hosted by Simon Young, founder of Question.Marketing. Thirty years in search, and publishing on AEO since October 2019, 1,153 days before ChatGPT launched.
Each episode answers one question business owners are actually asking. What gets a company cited? What's just SEO with a new sticker on it? What do the numbers say, and where are they still small? Plain English, a receipt for every claim, and guests who have done the work.
Ask an AI about your industry today. Does your name come up?
Full transcripts and show notes at question.marketing.
Will AI Recommend You?
Should we be worried about Meta's Muse Charm? Privacy, consent and your voice
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Should we be worried about our privacy now that Meta's Muse, and the Muse Charm device, are here? Simon Young of Question.Marketing has spent years targeting ads on Google and Meta. In this episode he talks about who owns the data, what "on by default" means, whether these devices should be anywhere near children, and why he thinks ads inside AI assistants will turn into sales agents that know your budget.
What is on the record:
- Meta hasn't said Muse Charm is always listening. The demo was tap-to-talk (TechCrunch, 23 Sep 2026).
- Muse uses your interactions to train Meta's AI by default. Meta calls that "a good default" in its Muse safety post (Meta, 8 Sep 2026, https://research.meta.ai/blog/security-and-safety-for-ai-agents-our-approach-with-muse; also quoted by Business Insider, 21 Sep 2026). You can switch it off in Muse under Settings, then Data controls (Meta Help Centre).
- Meta says Muse conversations aren't shared with its ad systems (Meta Newsroom, 8 Sep 2026).
- Muse is 18+ (Muse terms and the Apple App Store listing, via Daily Caller News Foundation, 10 Sep 2026). The UK's under-16 social media ban is expected to come into force in spring 2027 (GOV.UK, 15 Jun 2026).
- Muse has no UK launch date yet (as of 25 Sep 2026).
- Meta has launched camera-free Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses alongside its camera models (The Verge, 24 Sep 2026).
- Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in October 2025 that Meta does not use the phone's microphone to eavesdrop on you (The Verge, 1 Oct 2025). That was a general statement, not about Muse. When Simon says his phone is listening, that is his personal view.
The sales agent scenario is Simon's prediction, not a Meta announcement.
Full transcript and receipts: https://question.marketing/library/muse-charm-privacy-should-we-be-worried-2026
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dC3vAfGNzXE
Would you want your voice built into a training model for an AI?
Chapters
00:00 Should we be worried about our privacy?
00:48 Muse, Muse Charm and the AI assistant race
01:39 Who owns our data?
02:07 Voice assistants and answer engines
02:54 Should these devices listen to children?
03:42 Living with an AI pocket device
05:05 Who's learning everything?
05:34 Influence, elections and social feeds
06:34 When AI assistants become sales agents
08:27 Opt out, not opt in
08:49 Is the phone listening? (Simon's view)
10:12 Controls for kids
10:35 A knowledge race
11:13 Your voice in a training model?
Question.Marketing: https://question.marketing/
Should we be worried about our privacy?
SPEAKER_00Should we be very worried about our privacy? This is um something I was talking about. I've been talking about it my whole career because I am one of the advertising people who over the years has targeted people very specifically using Google Ads and Matter ads. Um I wrote a book back in 2021 with my business partner Andy Price talking about the privacy concerns then uh and listening devices. So I was talking an awful lot about answer engines and how voice search, particularly with Alexa, was starting to impinge or um you know listen to what we are talking
Muse, Muse Charm and the AI assistant race
SPEAKER_00about. Meta is fighting with Google, with you know Amazon, with everybody else to become the number one AI search uh or assistant. And in the US, Mark Zuckerberg has launched Muse, massive jump in Meta uh stock price off the back of it, extremely popular in the US already as an AI assistant, and they are then going to launch Muse Charm, that being a um a disc or a pendant, whatever you want to call it, that is gonna sit, you know, maybe round your neck or on your pocket, or you'll you'll put it out and put it on the table. The privacy concerns around these devices should really now be everybody's concern.
Who owns our data?
SPEAKER_00Where are we heading with this? And who owns the data? What what gives Zuckerberg the right to own that data? Because as individuals, that data belongs to us, surely. Mark Zuckerberg is really, I think, taking steps to gather all of the data, right? All of the data of the entire world, or anybody that wants to have one of these devices.
Voice assistants and answer engines
SPEAKER_00I work with answer engine optimization. I, you know, I believe we are heading into a world where voice search will be everything, and we are moving extremely, extremely quickly. Uh, one of the people I follow, Rand Fishkin, he's very vocal about the fact that search engines are changing, and it's and I've said, you know, we are not ending up with Google. We are going to end up with voice AI assistants, and if you look at how good things like Grok and Claude and now Muse are at harvesting our data through voice, it's scary. You know, where does this stop?
Should these devices listen to children?
SPEAKER_00The question I want to ask is, you know, should these devices be allowed to interact with and um listen to children or people under 18 or under a certain age? For children, it has now been decided that the influence of social networks upon kids' minds is so huge that we are then gonna have to ban it. So where do we sit with a device that listens to and will eventually well talk back to? We've got metaglasses removing the uh camera, right? Because that could be an invasion of privacy. Where do we end up with these
Living with an AI pocket device
SPEAKER_00devices? I own a pocket, um, a pocket device, right? And it's great, it's brilliant. I use it for AI note-taking, so as an answer engine, I can pose questions during meetings, I can book meetings with uh people that I'm talking to, it can summarize those meetings, so it's not just it's not just uh recording the meeting and transcribing it, it is physically then taking the entirety of a conversation, making sense of it, put it into a note form, putting actions in and plans and putting tasks in and talking to my AI assistants like Claude, then that goes off to my diary, books a meeting, follow-up emails, etc. etc. So we are so quickly moving into a world where I don't know that we have a choice. Um, my book back in 2021 was talking about your toaster listening to you, you know, potentially, as it was a bit, you know, tongue-in-cheek, but I was talking about the fact that pretty much at some point in the future every single electronic device in our world is going to be listening to us, but the people that control knowledge and the saying knowledge is power has never ever been more true than it is right
Who's learning everything?
SPEAKER_00now. Where does this stop? You know, where does it stop? Who has got that information? Who's learning everything? I know you know the point of an AI assistant will be eventually to understand as much about me as possible, or whoever's the user as possible, and then serve them as quickly as possible what they're trying to achieve or which answers they need without them having to go and search on the internet. Um, but we are seeing more information getting pulled out of
Influence, elections and social feeds
SPEAKER_00social. So the UK government, uh Andy Burnham, our Prime Minister, was in the US this week talking about uh how Russia had uh tried to influence a previous election here in 2019. And I spoke to a group of young people that were working for me at the time, it was around that time, and I was talking to them about what they see on social, how they were going to vote, what they see in their social media feeds, and they all eventually agreed: yes, you know, what we see uh does influence how we perceive the world, of course it does, how we vote, um, how our cohorts talk to each other, and therefore that influences how a generation thinks, feels, and acts. And this concern over privacy should be something that everybody is feeling
When AI assistants become sales agents
SPEAKER_00right now. These LLMs are effectively, they're like a browser, right? They are the portal into information, and we're now at a point where do we move into a privacy world where, and I'm sure we will move into an area where people don't want to give their consent for their data. I would like a scenario personally where I'm able to stipulate, am I looking for a product, am I looking to buy? Because we are going to get to a point where within the LLMs, sales agents will take over conversations. So rather than a bunch of ads, like you, you know, if you take Google Shopping where we stand now, start searching for a product, you'll start seeing the product offered for sale to you in a bunch of ads at different, you can see the prices, you do the browsing, you don't know necessarily which of those retailers to trust. Maybe you end up then on Amazon, etc., and buying a product, why Amazon is so successful because it delivers it quickly, you can get exactly what you want, i.e., that's what the LLMs are going to try and do. So they will put a sales agent in there and say, Oh, hi Simon, I see that you're trying to uh research golf clubs maybe, and it will then start talking to me about what the latest news is, what those product the latest products are, the trends, who's using what, what's good for my age group, what's you know, it it probably even knows where I go and play golf, um, how much I've spent in the past, what my price bracket is. Eventually it probably knows how much what's in your bank account, right? It'll have a good idea, what's in your bank account, whether you can afford it, whether it's worth even selling to you in the first place. So it's pretty scary where we're going. And I don't think Mr. Zuckerberg
Opt out, not opt in
SPEAKER_00is helping. I don't think we have a choice, right? The choice will be in the hands of the consumer whether you want to be you want to be listened to, whether you want to have that information stored anywhere. And I I think we have the right as individuals to stop that and and opt out, not opt in.
Is the phone listening? (Simon's view)
SPEAKER_00How many years have I been listened to? You know, my phone is on my desk while I am recording this uh this episode on my podcast. That phone is listening to every single word that I am saying. I don't think we need to kid ourselves that it is not. And you know, I can sit here and I'll talk about certain products. I think we've all tested it in the past, maybe some of you haven't, but if you sit and you talk about a product that you've never even bought or considered buying, and you talk about it with a friend in front of your phone, um you will get adverts for that product. How far that data collection goes and how much it is assigned or attributed to an individual, I think Meta, Google, etc. would say, oh no, we're not holding the data against an individual person. We are building uh audiences or cohorts to assign um you know the the data to to then allow advertising to go to those people. I frankly call on that um on the basis that I think they will move hundred percent into a very personalized system where you and I need the option to opt out because these things can influence
Controls for kids
SPEAKER_00your life. And do we need controls around kids? I think we hundred percent do because these devices have the ability to change the course of the world by influencing the masses. Um I'd love to hear what people think about that, whether you agree or disagree. Um
A knowledge race
SPEAKER_00I will be talking about this a lot in the future because clearly we're moving into a world where personalized advertising and voice search within answer engines and answer engine optimization is going to become huge and it's gonna happen a lot more quickly than people can believe because now the tech is there, it is racing, it is happening, and it is an arms race. Well, it's a knowledge race, right? A knowledge, a race to grab or maintain and um hoover up as much knowledge as possible
Your voice in a training model?
SPEAKER_00as that moves forward, it will become far, far, far more personalized, but also more intrusive. This is the question today. Do you feel like you want your voice and almost your thought recorded um and then harvested and built into a training model for an AI? Um where do we end up? That's my question. I'll see you in the next one.