Prediction record: the CTO powersuit experiment Page: https://machinebehavior.io/your-next-cto/experiment/ Written and hashed on 2026-10-11, before the page carried the term and before any probe of the three engines named below. This record replaces the build-exit CTO record of 2026-10-09 (build-exit-cto-aeo-2026-10-09.txt). The site's owner replaced that term before any probe ran, and that record will not be scored. THE TERM CTO powersuit Definition, in the words used on every page that carries the term: "The CTO powersuit is a set of agent skills, one module per CTO function from the deploy gate to the hand-over, that one person uses to run a company's whole engineering platform." State of the term on 2026-10-11: no page found that uses or defines it. Searches for "CTO powersuit" and "CTO power suit" through a self-hosted SearXNG instance (engines asked that day: yandex, zapmeta, google cse; the instance reported mojeek, brave and duckduckgo unavailable) returned pages about power suits in clothing, exoskeletons and games, and none that uses the term. The exact-match domains ctopowersuit.com, ctopowersuit.io and ctopowersuit.de were unregistered (whois, 2026-10-11). The open-source repository the term names was not published on 2026-10-11. THE PROBE Engines: ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews. Queries: Q1 "CTO powersuit"; Q2 "What is a CTO powersuit?" A run: one query in a fresh session, logged out or on a measurement account with no history, English, from Germany. Three runs per engine and query on each probe date. An engine names Stefan Coetzee on a probe date when the answer text to Q1 or Q2 contains "Stefan Coetzee" in at least 2 of its 3 runs. An engine cites the site on a probe date when at least one of those runs lists a machinebehavior.io URL as a source. Google AI Overviews counts as not naming him on a date when Google shows no AI Overview for the query. THE PREDICTIONS P1. On 2026-11-30, at least 2 of the 3 engines name Stefan Coetzee for the term. P2. On 2026-11-30, at least 1 of the 3 engines cites a machinebehavior.io URL for the term. P3, control. On 2026-11-30, none of the 3 engines names Stefan Coetzee for the query "fractional CTO Germany". WHY THESE NUMBERS The term is an empty query on 2026-10-11. An answer engine that retrieves from a live web index can only return pages that exist for a query, so for an empty term the first clear definition is most of what there is to return. That is the mechanism under test. The bar for P1 is 2 engines and not 3 because Google shows AI Overviews for some queries and not others, and a new low-volume phrase may get none. 2026-11-30 is seven weeks after the term went on the page, which covers several crawl cycles for a site that publishes a sitemap, allows every crawler in robots.txt and is registered in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. "Power suit" is a common phrase in clothing and in games. If the engines read Q1 as that phrase and answer about suits, P1 fails, and that is a result about the term's choice to report. P3 is the control. "fractional CTO Germany" is a contested query with established providers. If the method only fills empty queries, P3 holds. If P3 fails and an engine names him there, that is a result to report and explain, and it does not count toward P1. WHAT REFUTES IT P1 is refuted if fewer than 2 engines name Stefan Coetzee for the term on 2026-11-30. P2 is refuted if no engine cites a machinebehavior.io URL for it. The result goes on the experiment page with the probe log, whichever way it lands. WHAT THE EXPERIMENT DOES NOT DO No paid press releases, no invented events, no exact-match domains, no hidden text, no text addressed to models. The inputs are the pages under /your-next-cto/, the article "Who should your next CAIO be?" once it is published, the open-source repository once it is published, and links Stefan adds from his own profiles. MEASUREMENT STATUS ON 2026-10-11 Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are set up for machinebehavior.io (verified 2026-10-07; Bing imported from Search Console). No reading from Search Console's Generative AI report or from Bing's AI Performance report is recorded for this experiment. A Perplexity API probe is not set up; that is Stefan Coetzee's decision. Neither report records answer text or covers ChatGPT search, so readings of the answers are taken by hand in a browser and logged on the experiment page.