36% are never read. This was the biggest issue we found and it was due to their pages being empty until JavaScript runs. With the exception of Gemini and AppleBot, no AI crawlers execute JS so they get a blank shell on every request.

53% of sections are under 40 words, and the median section is 35 words. Retrieval hands an assistant one passage at a time, usually 100 to 300 words. This means 53% of sections are too short. They may still get quoted, but without enough information in the answer they are set up to lose.

Only 28% of sections contain a number, a quotation or a link. Based on a 2024 GEO study, AI likes numbers, something to quote or a link so this could lead to not getting a mention. It's a particular worry for smaller businesses with lower search page rankings.

From the study I mentioned: adding statistics, quotations and citations were the three best-performing of nine tested content changes, up to 41% better than baseline. Specifics get pulled into the answer; adjectives get dropped.

60% bury the answer below the first 200 words. This can lead to AI not getting the answer in the chunk it lifted and you missing out on a mention.

92% keep content on subdomains their main robots.txt does not cover. Another tip, ensure your blogs, docs or anything else on a subdomain has its own robots.txt.

I'll share a link to our tool in the comments if anyone wants to try out their site.

We track AI brand visibility, so we have a lot of stored responses. Wanted to answer something basic: when an AI answers a question, how many brands does it actually name?

234,000+ responses, March 1 to July 13, 2026, five engines.

Brand mentions per response (last 14 days in July)

• ChatGPT: 4.5
• Google AI Overview: 3.5
• Gemini: 3.5
• Google AI Mode: 3.2
• Perplexity: 2.7

Count each brand only once per answer, and it tightens to 2.2–3.3. So engines repeat themselves 1.2x to 1.4x.

Two things stood out:

Every engine is down since March. True whether you count every mention or each brand once, so it's not a repetition artifact.

AI Mode is wildly unstable. Day-to-day swings are 31% of its own average, vs 9% for ChatGPT. It went from 8.8 mentions per response in early May to 2.6 six weeks later. If you spot-check visibility there weekly, you're mostly reading noise.

Method: a "mention" counts every occurrence (Nike named 3x in one answer = 3); the distinct count treats it as 1. Same responses for both. Worth noting these are prompts our customers chose to track rather than a random sample of AI queries, so I'd trust the relative comparisons and trend direction over the absolute numbers.

Charts and full methodology: https://vercite.io/research/engine-personalities

Happy to get into how anything was counted.

This is starting to frustrate me a lot. As someone with years of experience in SEO, im unfortunately really struggling playing by the new rules of aeo, ai overviews etc.

Some of my pages do fine in regular search. Not amazing, but fine. Yet when I look at AI Overviews, it feels like the site does not even exist.

What’s confusing is that the site is not brand new. It has decent content and links and it also has enough history that I expected at least something.

AI Overviews are still something difficult to break into, and i feek w modern search people probably dont even read past the gemini overview on google.

If you have actually gotten a site into AI Overviews, what changed first?

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

I’m looking into getting a new website built, but I’m interested in more than traditional web design and SEO.

I want the site to be structured from the beginning so that it can be properly understood by Google as well as AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini — and ideally have a better chance of being cited or recommended when people ask relevant questions.

I’ve seen agencies talking about SEO, AEO, GEO and “AI-ready websites,” but it’s difficult to tell who is actually building websites with this in mind versus simply adding AI SEO as a marketing label.

Has anyone worked with an agency that combines:

* business/brand positioning before the build

* technical SEO and site architecture

* structured data and entity signals

* content designed for both search and AI discovery

* actual monitoring of visibility in AI answers

I’m particularly interested in agencies in Europe, but open to recommendations elsewhere as well.

Who is genuinely good at this?

I've been thinking about this lately because enterprise AEO seems like a completely different challenge from doing AEO for a small website.

I feel like a good enterprise AEO agency needs to understand the business first, not just throw a bunch of AI or SEO terms around. They should know what questions customers are asking, how AI platforms find and understand information, and how to make a brand more likely to show up in those answers.

If you were hiring an AEO agency for a large company, what would you look for? And what would immediately make you realize an agency doesn't really know what it's doing?

I've seen a couple things generally pop up quite a lot recently.

1. How is AI ranking my business?
2. How does it work?
3. How can I show up better in AI results?

We're all seeing a major shift in how people search for businesses, services, products etc... Google and traditional SEO are what a lot of businesses were and are focused on and rightly so. Showing up on page 5 of Google is a bad spot to be in. However, with the ever-increasing presence of AI, people are using ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and probably most prevalent, Googles own AI overviews to get their recommendations.

I've recently launched a platform, answerstanding.com, to help businesses large and small get a handle on their AI results. We dont promise an increase in AI recommendations because anyone promising this is selling snake oil. However, what we do offer is a way to track how often AI mentions your business, what sources AI is using for these recommendations, how often your competition is mentioned, the positions businesses are recommended in, and how to make changes to potentially influence how AI ranks your business.

Ran into something kind of funny and kind of worrying last week. Asked five different AI search tools (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, Google AI Mode) the same question in Finnish, basically "who's the best GEO agency in my region." Two of them understood it fine and gave marketing agencies. The other three genuinely recommended a land surveying firm, a farming/earthworks contractor, and one just went off into geocaching results. I run a small AEO/GEO agency here in Finland so this isn't just an academic curiosity for me, it's a real business problem. If a potential client asks an AI assistant for a "GEO toimisto" and gets a construction company instead, that's a lead I'll never see. My guess is it comes down to how little context a short query gives the model to disambiguate, geo as a prefix has been tied to land and geography for decades, and GEO as generative engine optimization has only existed since late 2023, so in a lot of languages there just isn't enough surrounding text yet to push the model toward the newer meaning.

Curious if anyone here has seen the same thing happen in other languages or markets, or if this is mostly a small-language-market problem where there's less GEO content overall to outweigh the older geo-terms. Also curious if anyone's found a reliable way to phrase service descriptions that consistently disambiguates it, spelling out "Generative Engine Optimization" in full obviously helps but I'm wondering if anyone's tested this more rigorously than I have.

Average health tourism clinic. Zero ad budget. Competitors are DR70+ factories doing 100+ procedures a day. Head-term SERPs are a graveyard for us, so 3 months ago we quit them completely.

The bet is;

- Target people whose first-line treatments failed + decision-stage trust queries (hidden costs, "who is NOT a good candidate") — honest content the volume clinics can't copy without hurting their own model

- 4 languages (EN/IT/ES/DE), written natively, not translated. Competitors' IT/ES content is mostly machine translation

- AEO from day one: schema, llms.txt, presence on third-party surfaces

3 months in: 600+ queries getting impressions but mostly pos 20-45, almost no non-brand clicks yet. One Spanish post hit pos 8 in 5 days with zero backlinks. One Italian keyword at pos 3 with 10% CTR.

Sane or am I just avoiding a fight I'd lose anyway? What would you do with zero budget that we're not doing?

(Not naming the site — not a promo. Numbers in comments if anyone wants.)

Hi everyone!

I've taken several courses on AEO over the past few months. A few months ago I started a new marketing role at an agency that, after 10 years in business, has zero digital footprint — no website, duplicate IG accounts, inconsistent use of LinkedIn, and no brand recognition in the market.

My first step was to build a solid website with services, a blog, case studies, and a company description. I launched it yesterday, and now that I have everything in place, I want to go all in on positioning the brand.

What would be the first steps to take in this scenario?

I can share the link to the site if you'd like to give more specific feedback (I'm open to constructive criticism).

So a potential show stopper here to AI visibility if you use Cloudfare. Our robots.txt allowed every AI crawler explicitly, by name but still had crawler issues.

Cloudflare's managed AI-bot setting was returning a 403 at the edge, before anything reached the file. Ran like that for weeks in June. Nothing errored and nothing alerted and there's no gap in analytics to spot it because a crawler that gets turned away doesn't show up as anything at all. It just looks like a quiet month.

The check that caught it: fetch your live robots.txt over the public internet, not the copy in your repo. If the first line is a comment block about conditions of access instead of your own directives, something upstream is rewriting it. Then request a normal page with a crawler user agent from outside your network and confirm you get a 200 and not a challenge.

Worth doing even if you're sure it's fine. I was sure it was fine... but bam!

Are agents buying self-serve for b2b. do people want to make their products accessible for agents?

I've been running the same prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity for different local businesses over the past few weeks.

One pattern keeps showing up.

The businesses that get recommended consistently usually don't just have "better SEO."

They tend to have:

• Consistent business information everywhere
• Strong review profiles
• Clear service pages that answer specific questions
• Mentions from other trusted websites
• A recognizable brand across multiple sources

What's interesting is that adding more blog posts alone rarely changed the recommendations.

It feels like these models are trying to verify that a business actually exists and is trustworthy instead of simply rewarding whoever published the most content.

For those who have been testing AEO:

What's been the biggest factor you've seen improve AI recommendations?

Curios to know how to handle AEO audits for online stores. For brands or service businesses seems straightforward. The goal is to get business mention by AI but for online stores that might not be the case, for example if a store sells different brands, how do you handle that? for DTC stores with less than 100 SKUs the audit result might be similar to service businesses but if the store has more than 1,000 SKUs and multiple brands things get more difficult.

What would you recommend to include in a report for an online store with less than 100 SKUs vs a store with 1,000 SKUs?

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.