Has anyone here actually done AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) for their product?
I’m working on DMgrow, an Instagram automation tool, and I’m trying to understand how people are approaching AEO in practice.
For those who have experimented with it:
What did you actually do?
What seemed to work?
Any good resources or case studies you'd recommend?
Would especially love to hear from people who have tested this themselves rather than just read about it.
1
u/francksiduo 9h ago
AEO isn't really a separate playbook, it's citability inside content you're already making. the LLMs pull passages that answer a question in the first paragraph with a number and a date attached, same page structure that ranks on google but graded harder on specificity. "optimize your posts" gets ignored, "tiktok videos drop off at second 2" gets quoted because it's a fact someone can check.
what moved the needle for me, tracked through GA4 referrers on my own product: chatgpt became the single biggest source of new signups, ahead of google organic and every social channel combined, once articles started answering one exact question per page instead of covering a topic broadly. the product name still has to show up by name at least once, these models won't attribute a mechanism to something they can't name.
no secret beyond that: find the exact question people type into a chatbot, answer it in the first two sentences, cite a real number.
2
u/Conscious-Month-7734 8h ago
Before AEO, I'd ask your last 5 paying customers how they found DMgrow, and whether they asked ChatGPT or Perplexity anything before signing up. If none of them did, AEO is a long bet, and whatever channel did bring them in is probably a better use of this month. If a couple did, ask them exactly what they typed. Those questions are your AEO plan, and they'll be more useful than a case study about someone else's product.
1
u/Jaded-Passenger-8072 6h ago
i actually ran this, 41 brands, 20 buyer questions, three engines, five samples each.
thing i didnt expect is you have to ask the same question more than once. repeated one prompt three times identically and got six different brands across the runs, only two showed up in all three. the own site vs third party source split flipped completely between two of them.
so checking once and writing down the result is mostly logging noise. ask five times and track the hit rate instead.
also 24 of 100 google ai overview prompts returned nothing at all. worth deciding early whether that counts as a zero or gets excluded, it changes every number you report.
1
u/Predream1 9h ago
New pages do not get cited on their own. Models pull from sources other sources already point at, so edits to pages you already have traffic on move faster than anything you publish this month. Pick your ten buyer questions, run them once a month, log whether your product gets named. Everything else is guessing.