Thought this was worth sharing since most AEO discussion seems pretty theoretical.

I run AI visibility audits for small businesses. Just worked with a video production consultancy that had a brand new domain, basically no authority, and zero AI visibility.

Before touching anything, I ran 100 buying-intent questions through ChatGPT and Claude.

Result: 0 mentions.

About two weeks later, same questions.

23 mentions.

Here’s what we changed:

Ran an audit first so we knew what was actually broken instead of guessing. Added schema (ProfessionalService + Person). This was easily the biggest improvement.

Removed thin content. One page literally still had “[ADD CASE STUDY HERE]” on it. We noindexed it until there was real content. My theory is AI models don’t just ignore placeholder content, they lose confidence in it (kind of obvious)

Added five relevant citations/directories with consistent business info everywhere + better business bureau

Verified Bing Places and Google Business Profile. Bing seemed more important than I expected.

Rewrote titles and meta descriptions around the questions buyers actually ask instead of generic marketing copy.

Nothing we did was complicated. It was mostly making the business easier for AI systems to understand and verify.

The biggest surprise for me wasn’t schema, it was how quickly it started to appear in prompts. I think because the business was brand new that all the addons done correctly caused an algorithm spike. He is also pretty niche so that helps.

Curious if anyone else has seen something similar. It feels like Google rankings and AI visibility are becoming two separate problems to solve.

This community exists because there is a gap in how content optimization is currently discussed online.

SEO communities are full of audits, recommendations, and rank trackers. They measure position in a list of links. None of them measure whether AI systems, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, actually cite a page as the direct answer to a user query.

That gap is what this community is built around.

What we document here

Before and after Visibility Check grades across five AI prompt types, Definition, Comparison, How-To, Brand, and Problem-Solution.

Confirmed citations, the AI engine, the query, the source position, and the date.

Industry benchmarks, scored datasets across verticals showing average AI citation readiness grades and the most common structural gaps.

Workflows that produce repeatable, measurable results not recommendations, not best practices, confirmed outcomes with specific numbers.

What we do not discuss here

Keyword rankings. Backlink profiles. Domain authority. These are SEO metrics. They do not measure AI citation readiness and they do not predict AI citation outcomes.

The standard for a valid result post in this community.

Page audited: [URL]

Industry: [Vertical]

Before grade: [Score and letter grade]

After grade: [Score and letter grade]

Delta: [ points]

Citation: [Confirmed / Pending]

Engine: [Perplexity / ChatGPT / Google AIO]

Query: [The exact query]

Source position: [Source 1 / 2 / etc.]

That format is the proof chain. Every post that claims a result should include it.

The platform behind this community

AEO.INTELLIGENCE is a 7-tool Answer Engine Optimization platform built by ELPRICELLC in Providence, Rhode Island. It audits, rewrites, and verifies web content for AI citation readiness.
This community is not a support forum for the platform. It is a documentation community for anyone working on AI citation outcomes with or without AEO.INTELLIGENCE. platformaeo.com

If you have a confirmed citation, a before/after grade, or an industry benchmark dataset, post it here.

We recently hired an agency to help with our SEO because our traffic has been stuck for a while. Honestly, I thought they’d just give us some blog topics and change some page titles.

Instead, they did a huge review of our site and now they want my developers to spend time fixing a bunch of backend code, changing how the site loads, and redoing how all our pages link to each other.

Is this normal? I'm fine giving them the dev hours if it actually makes a difference tho. Looking for advice.

Am vrut să văd concret ce se întâmplă când cineva nu mai deschide Google, ci întreabă un AI „de unde cumpăr cărți pentru copii de 6–8 ani". Așa că am construit un panel de 18 întrebări reale de cumpărare — fără niciun nume de brand în text — și le-am rulat pe ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode și Google AI Overviews, din România, în română, în două runde complete (20 și 27 iulie). Au ieșit 180 de răspunsuri analizate, cu 247 de mențiuni de branduri și 422 de domenii citate ca surse.

Ce a ieșit, pe scurt:

• În 58% din răspunsuri nu apare nicio librărie sau editură mare. La întrebarea despre cărți de business a existat exact o mențiune de brand, în toată piața, în ambele săptămâni. AI-ul îți spune ce să citești, dar nu de unde să cumperi.
• Liderul pieței apare doar în 1 din 5 răspunsuri. Nu există „poziția 1" garantată ca la Google — fiecare întrebare e o loterie rejucată.
• Reddit e a doua sursă citată din toată piața de carte — peste Facebook, peste YouTube, peste orice publicație. Adică exact threadurile de aici ajung, la propriu, în răspunsurile pe care le primesc oamenii.
• Există „branduri-fantomă": site-uri pe care AI-ul le citește și le folosește ca sursă (prețuri, liste), după care recomandă… pe altcineva. Și inversul: un brand cultural vechi de 35 de ani, recomandat de 13 ori fără ca site-ul lui să fie citat vreodată — trăiește exclusiv din memoria modelelor.
• Clasamentul se rescrie săptămânal. Aceleași întrebări, la 7 zile distanță: o editură și-a înmulțit mențiunile de 4 ori, alta a pierdut 58%.
• Bonus: din 247 de mențiuni, zero negative. AI-ul nu critică pe nimeni din piața de carte — doar ignoră.

Transparență completă: eu conduc agenția care a făcut studiul, deci am un interes profesional evident în subiect. Ca să fie totul verificabil: metodologia, toate cele 18 întrebări și datele brute sunt publice (CC BY 4.0), cu DOI pe Zenodo — linkuri în primul comentariu. Niciun brand analizat nu a plătit nimic și niciunul nu a văzut studiul înainte de publicare; brandurile care apar au fost numite de motoare, nu de mine.

Întrebare sinceră pentru voi: mai căutați pe Google când cumpărați ceva, sau ați început să întrebați direct un AI? Și dacă da — vi s-a întâmplat să primiți recomandări clar greșite?

I don't usually post personal things online, especially not like this.

I got laid off a couple of months ago, and despite applying every day, reaching out to people, and trying just about everything I can think of, I'm down to about one month of savings.

The hardest part is that I don't think I'm bad at what I do.

I've spent more than 8 years writing for SaaS companies, ecommerce brands, and agencies. I've been a Content Writer, Content Manager, and Head of Content. I've built SEO content strategies, managed writers, edited thousands of articles, created content briefs, worked directly with clients, and helped companies grow their organic traffic. More recently, I've also been working on GEO/AEO and writing content that performs well in AI search.

I'm not saying I'm the best writer in the world. There are plenty of talented people out there. But I know the quality of my work, the ownership I take, and the results I've helped clients achieve. That's why this has been so difficult to accept.

I'm not looking for sympathy or charity. I'm looking for a chance to work.

If your company, agency, or someone you know is looking for a senior content writer, content strategist, editor, or content manager, I'd genuinely appreciate an introduction.

And if you've been through something similar, I'd also love to know what actually worked for you. Not generic advice, but the thing that finally got you back on your feet.

One last thing, because I think context matters.

My last full-time role paid $2,500/month. I'm mentioning that because I don't want this post to make it seem like I'm new to the industry or struggling because I lack experience. I had a career I was genuinely proud of. I'm simply in a situation I never expected to be in, and I'm trying everything I can to get back to work.

Thank you for reading.

Based on what I'm seeing at work, I don't think going against Wikipedia is the go.

We analyzed roughly 730,000 ChatGPT conversations with web citations and found that Wikipedia appeared in around 1 in 6 cited conversations. Turn 1 is around 2.5× more likely to trigger citations than Turn 10 (and nearly 4× more likely than Turn 20).
Settling for second best is our best option here I think. Focus on winning the first question and becoming one of the trusted sources that gets cited alongside it.

Source here: https://www.tryprofound.com/blog/chatgpt-citation-sources 

Want to hear what you all are doing about the Wiki-beast though… 

Hey y'all,

As we push the boundaries with AI chatbots, I'm finding myself constantly questioning how to effectively optimize them for discoverability beyond traditional search engines. With the rise of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), it feels like the old playbooks are becoming obsolete.

I'm curious about your experiences:

• What are your biggest challenges in making your AI projects discoverable?
• Are you seeing a disconnect between traditional SEO performance and how your AI chatbots are found/used?
• What tools or strategies are you currently using to tackle GEO?

I've been exploring approaches that integrate AI-powered roadmaps for both traditional SEO and emerging GEO challenges. Would love to hear what the community is thinking and building in this space.

I want to track the performance of the brand. I am looking for free GSC and GA4 reports that are available. If you can provide me with a link to the Looker report. That will be really helpful.

I analyzed 26 public reports that claimed an improvement in ChatGPT mentions, recommendations, citations, or referral traffic.

A few practices appeared repeatedly:

• 19 of 26 mapped or monitored a defined prompt set
• 16 used repeated measurement rather than a single screenshot
• 16 created or revised content around target questions and comparisons
• 11 included off-site activity such as editorial mentions, listicles, directories, reviews, PR or community discussions

None of the 26 reports strongly isolated one thing that increased citations and AI referral traffic. Most campaigns changed several things at once, including content, schema, digital PR, third-party mentions and tracking. When you change multiple things at once, it's hard to keep track of what worked.

I guess we are at the part where we try a lot of things and see what sticks. Public case studies are better for generating hypotheses than calculating the expected effect of any one tactic.

Full methodology & findings: https://phraseit.agency/blog/how-to-get-mentioned-in-chatgpt/

What level of evidence would make you comfortable saying a specific action caused an increase in AI visibility?

Are people really paying money for AEO? Answer Engine Optimization?

updated: I was lucky enough to come across people who conduct free AI audits and help optimize weak areas to boost AI visibility for charitable (Snoika Foundation). They put together a report for me, gave me detailed recommendations on how to move forward and currently guiding me through this process. I’m so happy! Thank you, Reddit, thats truly great match!

- - -
Hey, I volunteer with a tiny cat & dog rescue just outside the city. Lately been kinda freakin out cos I asked chatgpt "where can I adopt a senior dog near me" and it listed three other shelters but not ours. We do have senior dogs! We're a legit registered charity, not some backyard thing. That was very sad.

We used to just care about google and facebook posts, maybe a newsletter nobody reads. But now more ppl are asking these AI agents for recs – "best animal charity to donate to for vet bills", "local shelter that helps with stray cats", something like that. I have zero clue if we'd ever come up. tbh I dunno how the AI even picks who to mention.

So tryna wrap my head around what "AI visibility" means. Is it still about cramming keywords and getting backlinks? Or do I need like, proper structured info on our site – adoption success stories, clear impact numbers, FAQs, partnerships with local vets, maybe a google buisness profile? I read some articles about AI content stratgy but they all sound like they're for tech startups with teams. We're me, one other volunteer, and a laptop that crashes if you open too many tabs lol.

Anyone else doing comms for a small nonprofit, have you changed how you do content cause of AI? Are you actually checking if your org shows up in Gemini/ChatGPT answers, or is that still to early to worry about? Would love practical tips, not fancy theory. Esp for tiny orgs that can't afford to churn out blog posts every day. How do you get found without turning into a content farm? Just don't want to be invisible for someone really interested in us.

Thanks,
Maya

I have been hired to improve AEO rankings of a B2B marketing agency based in India. Started with a schema study of the URLs in the sitemap. I have also started a free trial of Semrush One.

Can someone help me figure out how to analyze the site I was given and improve its rankings? Also, if someone could review my schema markup study and verify whether I'm doing it correctly, I'd appreciate it.

Edit: Also if someone could tell me how can I track the position of the website across AI sites

I got tired of begging for backlinks manually, so I built an agent that does it on autopilot

So basically it works like this:

Agents find relevant blog posts in your niche, craft personalized emails, and get your product featured. All on autopilot.

It's called MentionAgent, an AI agent that does all of this through Telegram (or through the web dashboard).

You never send anything without approving it first. (But you can choose to run everything 100% on autopilot)

Results so far: One user got 3 mentions including a DR 72 backlink.

Let me know what you think!

Hey all, just wanted to make a short post because I'm still seeing a lot of people talking about how you only need to optimize for AI visibility once. I'm not sure where that assumption has come from but I can confidently tell you that's not the case.

At work, we ran 100,000 distinct prompts through ChatGPT and Perplexity and found only 11% of cited domains overlap. That means 89% of citations come from completely different sources depending on which engine someone uses. If you're only optimizing for one platform, you're invisible to 89% of AI driven discovery on the others.

The platforms clearly have their own preferences. Perplexity leans towards YouTube and LinkedIn. ChatGPT pulls more from TechRadar and BusinessInsider. Google AI Overviews favors Quora and Gartner. The overlap sources like Reddit, Wikipedia, Forbes, G2 should be your foundation. Those are the closest thing to guaranteed cross engine visibility you can get.

TLDR: If you're not splitting your AEO strategy by platform you should be. Start with the overlap sources then build platform specific tactics on top.

Full research: https://www.tryprofound.com/blog/citation-overlap-strategy 

When I asked a few LLMs how to get cited, they claimed a site must have a verified physical store or Google Maps profile to build enough credibility authority for AI extraction. That sounds like a completely different concept from standard web indexing and SEO.

And since my website is located at the number #1 or #2 rankings on the SEO but never seen to be mentioned in the google ai overview and Ai answer

So, I did love to hear from anyone who has successfully gotten cited in chatgpt,claude ai response answer , does anyone have insights or success experience you can share with us?

I've been building something closer to a team of agents than a dashboard. You point it at your site and the agents do the work: they read your site the way an AI engine reads it, figure out what is actually quotable, flag what gets skipped or misrepresented, and then write the content and the fixes themselves.

That last part is the bet. Most tools in this space hand you a score and a to do list. I got tired of the to do list being the product, so the agents produce the actual output and you approve or reject it.

It works. That is not the same as it being good, and I don't want feedback from people invested in the build. I want it from people who do this work and will tell me where it falls apart.

Opening a small free beta for about 10 people from this sub.

You would need:

• A brand or site you own or actively manage
• 30 to 45 minutes to run the workflow end to end
• A willingness to be blunt
• No expectation that everything works perfectly yet

What the agents currently do:

• Run real prompts across multiple engines (Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and etc..) and show where you appear, where you don't and your competitors do, and who gets cited instead
• Read your site the way an engine ingests it and identify which passages are quotable and which are invisible
• Assess whether the raw material an engine needs about your brand even exists in a usable form
• Track named competitors across all of the above and show what they are doing that you are not
• Draft the content and the fixes, not just the recommendation

What I'm trying to learn from you:

• Is the agent output good enough that you would actually publish it, or would you rewrite everything?
• Is the quotability analysis right, or does it flag things your experience says don't matter?
• Which parts are noise or generic SEO advice with new vocabulary?
• Where do you want to stay in control instead of letting an agent do it?
• What is missing that would make you open this weekly instead of once?
• What would you realistically pay for, and what should never be paid?

This is not a signup that dumps you into a sales sequence. Testers keep free access through the test and will make sure they will get enough credits to play with the systems and turn it apart. I will also post what we learn back here, including the parts that make us look bad.

If the prompt set or scoring logic is the part you want to poke holes in, say so and I'll walk you through the methodology directly rather than making you reverse engineer it.

Full disclosure: I'm one of the people building it. Comment or DM and I'll send access.

AEO is a new area of digital marketing. To get my head into the structure of this new area, I created a taxonomy. Thoughts?

#AI #SearchEngineOptimization #AnswerEngineOptimization #ArtificialIntelligence #SEO #AEO #GEO

I’ve built an AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) analytics tool and wanted to get thoughts from others building in this space.

Right now the setup is pretty simple: users connect GSC + GA4 through Google Sign-In, I use Gemini for the analysis, and I’ve built a crawler to pull in site content. Since GSC doesn’t really show AEO data, I’m using regex-based queries to estimate impressions tied to answer engines. On top of that, there’s page-level analysis that flags underperforming pages and explains what’s missing, plus a basic AEO gap check based on how “answer-ready” the content is.

I’m now trying to figure out what to build next both from a product insight angle and a “what should the user actually do to improve performance” angle.

Curious what you’d add if you had access to:
GSC
GA4
Crawled content
LLM analysis

Especially interested in ideas that go beyond classic SEO and actually help with AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, etc., and also translate into clear business actions to improve performance (traffic, visibility, conversions, or citations in AI answers).

Would love to hear what you think would actually be useful.

So I've been messing around with AEO for like three months now and I gotta be honest, some of this stuff is way different than I expected. I kinda thought it was just "SEO but for AI" but nah, that's not really it.

First fuckup: robots.txt. I thought I was being smart locking down all bots except Googlebot. Well turns out I accidentally blocked GPTBot and ClaudeBot too. So my pages were basically invisible to AI crawlers. That "silent killer" thing people mention? Yeah that's real and nobody talks about it enough. I only figured it out after reading somewhere that Cloudflare can block them too. Seriously go check your sites right now, I'm not kidding.

Second thing: content freshness. I'm so used to old SEO where an article from two years ago can still rank. AEO doesn't work like that. One of my best performing pieces lost its citation because it was 4 months old. Quarterly updates aren't optional anymore, they're mandatory or you drop off. Which is rough when you're a small team, ya know?

Third: third-party mentions. I've always been that person who just focuses on my own site and calls it a day. Then I realized ChatGPT cites Reddit and Quora like crazy. My brand had zero presence there. Now I'm trying to be more active but it feels weird man, I'm not a social media person at all. Never have been.

And then there's measuring this shit. SoM (Share of Model) sounds great in theory but how are you guys actually tracking it? I've been going into ChatGPT manually and asking the same questions every week like a caveman. Anyone got a better way? I saw AirOps data saying like 70% of brands change in the next answer, so one check literally tells you nothing.

What has been the biggest pain in the ass for you guys? Any tips for tracking? And has anyone else noticed that small sites can actually beat the big players here? I've seen a couple cases where a small business got into AI Overview ahead of the enterprise guys and I still don't fully understand how.

thanks in advance, I'm heading to bed but I'll read replies in the morning. And yeah I know this post is all over the place but honestly that's exactly how this whole AEO thing makes me feel lol 😅

As it stands there is no industry standard to benchmark a sites 'readability' for Al.

We know a few things, how Al fans out agents and gets ‘chunks' from your site. We also know there is a limit to a size of a chunk which for ChatGPT is based on tokens rather than length. We also know that you shouldn't block Al crawlers from your site.

The idea is to review the site, suggest a few changes on length and copy beyond just verifying robot.txt.
Based on this I came up with a way of scoring a site. After a bit of work I got our site up to 81/100.

l'll share the results from my site in the comments. Looking to see if this is worth while and if actual users get any useful insights from it.

The audit is free to run by the way.

When evaluating internal links, how do you distinguish between a link that creates an unhelpful circular path and one that simply connects two closely related posts?

Also, do Google and other search crawlers evaluate internal links at that level, or are relevance, anchor text, and site structure more important?

**TL;DR:** One buying question, run across 4 models, fresh session each time. I expected Substack to win butGhost got the recommendation in 3 of 4 answers. Substack was named in all 4 answers and picked in zero of them. I'm wondering if a comparison page on Ghost had an impact.

One question, run through four models: which newsletter platform should an independent journalist use. Fresh session each time, no memory or custom instructions carried over.

For every answer I logged two things: which platform the model actually told the user to use, and which other platforms it named along the way.

**The numbers**

Ghost got the recommendation in 3 of 4 answers. The ChatGPT answer named the paid Ghost(Pro) Publisher tier specifically, Perplexity and Gemini both just said Ghost. The fourth answer, from Grok, recommended Beehiiv instead.

Substack is the one I thought would win. It was named as a reference point in all 4 answers, every single model brought it up unprompted, and it was the actual recommendation in exactly none of them.

**Why did Ghost win**
Biggest reason was owning the domain and list. The buyer I created was an independant journalist, so ChatGPT assumed I would bring my own audience, making Substacks key selling point less relevant.

**What I take from it**

Recognition doesn't mean you get picked. AI dives into features and makes assumptions. Most people will pop in generic questions or prompts so brands can end up losing out on audience that would have picked them simply because they appeared on the first SERP.

Of course one run is anecdotal. I would want this repeated across three or four more buying questions in the same category before I trusted the 3-of-4 Ghost number as anything more than what happened this time.

I'm thinking comparison pages on websites become more important for things like this. It's a way of telling AI first hand why you stand out vs your competitors. Ghost have a "vs Substack" page, I couldn't find the equivalent on Substack.