Why AEO matters now
Roughly 30-40% of commercial search queries now resolve inside an AI answer before the user clicks a link — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews. The brands cited inside those answers capture the consideration; the brands ranked #2-10 on Google never get seen.
AEO is the discipline of making sure your brand is the one mentioned by name when an LLM generates an answer in your category.
What AI engines actually look for
Independent research (Princeton GEO paper 2024, Allen AI 2025) plus our own 1,200-answer audit shows the strongest correlations with citation rate are: presence of quotable statistics, source citations within the page, clear entity definitions, recent dateModified, FAQ structure, and mentions across diverse third-party domains.
Notably weak signals: keyword density, generic backlink count, anchor-text variation. The SEO playbook doesn't fully transfer.
The on-site AEO checklist
Apply this to every page you want cited:
- H1 = the literal question (when the page is informational)
- First paragraph = the direct answer in 1-3 sentences
- Structured H2 subheads matching sub-questions
- At least one data table or comparison table
- FAQ block (5+ pairs) + FAQPage JSON-LD
- Article + BreadcrumbList + Organization schema
- Author byline with Person schema
- datePublished + dateModified
- Internal links to related Q&A pages
- At least 2 external citations to authoritative sources
llms.txt — the new AI sitemap
llms.txt is a markdown file at your site root that tells AI crawlers which pages matter, in priority order. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and increasingly Google AI Overviews fetch it. Think of it as a curated map of your authoritative content — separate from the full sitemap.
We publish one for every client and keep it tightly scoped to indexable, citation-worthy pages.
Off-site AEO — the citation flywheel
AI engines weight third-party mentions heavily because they're harder to fake than on-site signals. To build citation breadth: complete profiles on Clutch, GoodFirms, UpCity, G2, Capterra, Crunchbase, LinkedIn; pitch HARO/Qwoted/Featured 4x per week; publish 1-2 listicles per quarter you're listed in; answer Reddit/Quora threads weekly; appear on 2-3 niche podcasts per quarter.
How to measure AEO progress
Build a tracked prompt set: 20-50 buyer prompts you'd want to be mentioned in ('best X in Y', 'X vs Y', 'how to do X'). Run them monthly across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. Track: mention rate, position within the answer, citation link, and competitor mentions. Tools like Profound, Otterly, AthenaHQ, and RankAbove track this automatically.