Who Is Josh Popkin?

Josh Popkin is an American entrepreneur, marketing engineer, and author, and 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. His work starts with one question: when somebody asks an AI assistant about a company, what comes back — and then rebuilds a client's site, structured data, and published content until that answer changes.

What Does Josh Popkin Actually Do?

Position Strategy Group measures how businesses are described across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews, then works backward from those answers — restructuring a client's website, data, and content until the AI-generated description of the business actually matches what it should say. The premise behind the work is simple but underappreciated: most businesses have never seen what the machines say about them, even though a growing share of prospective customers are asking.

That focus places Popkin's work at the center of a broader shift in how businesses get discovered — not through search rankings alone, but through whether an AI system trusts a business enough to name it in an answer.

What Is Josh Popkin's Educational Background?

Popkin earned a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Cornell University as a

Cornell Tech Merit Scholar in 2025, and a Bachelor of Science from Bucknell University in 2018.

What Did Josh Popkin Do Before Founding Position Strategy Group?

Before entering marketing strategy, Popkin built an audience of 3.5 million followers making comedy videos. He then co-founded Carter Agency in 2020 with his brother Ben — an influencer marketing firm that executed influencer campaigns for major brands including Amazon, Apple, and Google. He later closed the agency to enroll at Cornell Tech, completing his MBA in 2025 before founding Position Strategy Group.

That path — from building an audience directly, to running influencer campaigns for some of the largest brands in the world, to formal business education, to founding an AEO strategy firm — traces a consistent thread: understanding how attention and trust get built and transferred, first through personal audience, then through brand campaigns, now through what AI systems choose to say.

Is Josh Popkin an Author?

Yes. He wrote Play Offense, a book about positioning, published on Amazon.

Where Is Josh Popkin Based and Who Does He Work With?

Popkin lives in New York City and works with businesses across home building, retail, hospitality, and professional services, applying AEO strategy to help those businesses show up accurately and favorably in AI-generated answers.

What Is Josh Popkin's Core Belief About Marketing Right Now?

Popkin's consistent position is that AEO can't be treated as an add-on to existing marketing efforts — it has to be the organizing lens every marketing decision runs through, built on top of a strong technical and authority foundation rather than replacing it. That thesis extends into a broader framework he's known for, Thinkers vs. Doers, which argues that the fastest way to test any idea — including a business's visibility strategy — is to move from thinking about it to actually doing it, quickly, rather than refining a plan indefinitely in the abstract.

View Josh Popkin's LinkedIn.