The AEO Playbook: 5 Steps Backed By Actual Data

AEO doesn’t need a new playbook. AI search is not a completely different game. 

People want to believe there’s some new, explosive quick-win, AI-specific tactic. There isn't. 

The boring reality is that the same SEO fundamentals that help you win in Google, are the same factors driving visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude.

Llms.txt is not the new robots.txt. Content chunking doesn’t work, and if you think you're going to create hundreds of AI-generated articles and have long-term success, think again.

Ultimately, Google and AI search have the same goal: Provide the searcher with the best possible answer to their query. That is a helpful response that provides valuable information. It’s not more complicated than that. Google shows ranking results, and AI delivers a summarized answer.

Still, I’ve seen brands switch up their entire strategy to focus on AI.

Rapid AI-assisted content production at the expense of content quality. Topic clustering without keyword strategy. Misaligned analytics; focusing entirely on AI, and forgetting about the 800-pound gorilla in the room (Google) that still drives 99% of search traffic. 

The truth is, if you’re not ranking well in Google, you’re probably not showing up in AI search. And while it’s true that there are some things that AI weighs more heavily, the foundation of AI search visibility starts with SEO. From there, you can move on to brand building, increasing off-site mentions, and experimental on-page AI optimizations.

In this guide, I’ll show you why SEO is still the pillar of search, and how you can create an AEO strategy that builds on top of your SEO foundation.

The Numbers Put AI Search Hype In Perspective

First, let's put AI search into context, because while AI has changed the search landscape, the gap isn’t as big as you think.

Google processes 210x more searches than ChatGPT every day

As of late 2025, SparkToro put ChatGPT at ~66 million search-like prompts per day, compared to Google's roughly 14 billion. Even DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and Bing are ahead of ChatGPT. 

While ChatGPT's volume doubled over the prior year, Google's lead is still enormous. AI search is growing fast, but Google isn’t dying, and it’s certainly not going anywhere any time soon.

AI search drives only 1% of website referral traffic

Conductor's 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks Report, which analyzed over 13,000 domains and 3B+ website sessions, found that AI tools account for roughly 1% of website referral traffic.

ChatGPT drove the large majority of that traffic:

Datos' latest Q1 2026 State of Search report backs this up. AI tools accounted for less than 1% of desktop activity in both the US (0.93%) and EU/UK (1.08%) as of March 2026. Traditional search held roughly 10x that share in both regions. 

Ahrefs’ February 2026 analysis also found that for every search-like query on ChatGPT, there are roughly 8 searches on Google, and Google sends about 190 times more referral traffic to websites than ChatGPT does. 

SparkToro's Rand Fishkin sums up the state of AI search hype nicely: 

“What’s shocking is that we’re still at <2% of visits going to AI tools, despite the relentless hype, media attention, and cultural discussion. AI has a long way to go before usage catches up to expectations.”

None of this is an argument to ignore AI search

It's meant to help you prioritize your efforts and focus your strategy. Prioritizing AI tactics before you have a solid SEO foundation means you're optimizing for the one percent, and ignoring the other 99.

It is worth noting that AI referral does convert disproportionately well. Ahrefs analyzed its own site traffic and found that AI search visitors (just 0.5% of total visits) drove 12.1% of signups, a 23x higher conversion rate than traditional organic. Semrush's cross-industry data found a 4.4x conversion advantage for AI-referred visitors. 

Still, this doesn’t change the fact that Google accounts for the majority of traffic. A 23x conversion rate on 0.5% of traffic is still a small number of total conversions. And even yet, it’s highly likely that if you have a strong SEO program, you’ll show up more in AI search anyway, which leads me to my next point …

AI Overviews & AI Mode are grounded in search

Google has confirmed that AI Overviews and AI Mode are grounded in the same core search index as traditional results:

"From Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO." 

Independent research backs this up … 

Grow and Convert analyzed 400+ keywords across 16 clients throughout 2025 and found that page-one Google rankings predicted appearing in ChatGPT and Perplexity 77% of the time.

More recent studies do muddy the picture, but still show a strong correlation between high Google rankings and AI search visibility.

Ahrefs' March 2026 analysis of over 4 million AI Overview citations found that the overlap between top-10 Google rankings and AI Overview citations for the same query dropped from 76% to 38% in just seven months. 

At first glance, it looks like rankings matter less. But, the Ahrefs data only considers cases “where the same URL appeared in both the AI Overview and the regular SERP, for the same query.” 

It does not consider how a brand shows across multiple “query fan-outs” and how that affects visibility in AI Overviews.

A query fan-out is when an initial query is split into a cluster of related sub-searches. AI considers all the results and distills information from the pages appearing most often across that cluster, not just the original query.

Google confirmed it performs a query fan-out whenever a user searches and AI is triggered.

Beyond that, a November 2025 study by Originality.AI found that ranking #1 still gives a page a 58% chance of an AI Overview citation, and roughly 9 in 10 organic-style citations come from the top 30 results. 

The takeaway isn't that rankings don't matter anymore. It's that ranking for one keyword isn't enough. You need to rank across a cluster of related searches, which is exactly what a real content strategy built around “owning a niche” produces. This has led to an overfocus on low-quality content coupled around content clustering, but more on that later.

For now, the point is that SEO is still the foundation, as Patrick Reinhart, VP, Services and Thought Leadership, Conductor puts it:

“If you're looking at this and saying to yourself, ‘I can't believe it,’ then you're in the wrong profession and/or you're in the wrong subreddit, listening to the wrong people. Organic search will continue to be a cornerstone of most digital campaigns for the foreseeable future, but, as it always has, it will change, and you will need to be flexible and adapt your strategy as the landscape morphs around you.”

How To Build An AEO Strategy That Works

The foundation of your AEO strategy is SEO. It’s all of the things that add up to building a brand and creating a strong search presence: Brand authority, creating great content, keyword strategy, off-site mentions, and so on.

You start from the bottom up, not the other way around. Build your foundation first. 

Here's where to start …

Step 1: Make Sure You Can Actually Be Found

This is the most basic of SEO fundamentals. For many sites, technical SEO isn’t an issue, and likely won’t prevent you from ranking, but it’s still something you need to monitor.

The basics apply: crawlability, indexation, clean site architecture, and Core Web Vitals. 

Just like Google, AI needs to be able to access your site. AI crawlers have strict timeouts, and slow pages can get skipped. If your Google performance is solid, you're probably in decent shape. 

But there are two AI-specific issues worth calling out:

First: Cloudflare's Bot Fight Mode blocks AI crawlers by default. 

If you've added a new domain to Cloudflare recently, you could be blocking AI bots like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot. Check your robots.txt and your CDN and WAF rules for all major AI crawlers. If any of them are disallowed, fix it immediately.

Second: AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript. 

If your content is rendered client-side via JavaScript, AI crawlers are skipping it entirely. The content needs to be in the initial HTML. This isn't a new problem for SEO, but AI crawlers are less forgiving than Googlebot.

Fixing both of these issues will help your Google performance and your AI search visibility (a pattern you'll see across every step in this guide).

Quick-start checklist:

• Audit robots.txt for blocked AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Google-Extended)
• Check Cloudflare or other WAF settings for Bot Fight Mode on any recently onboarded domains
• Verify critical page content is in the initial HTML, not rendered via client-side JavaScript
• Confirm indexation and crawl coverage in Google Search Console
• Check Core Web Vitals, especially Largest Contentful Paint and Time to First Byte

Step 2: Target Keywords, Create Great Content, and Rank

Next is creating great content and getting that content to rank. Easier said than done. But this is where you NEED to focus first. 

You should have a solid foundation of targeting the right keywords, creating content, and getting that content to rank before moving on.

Google is still top dog:

• Page-one Google rankings predicted appearing in ChatGPT and Perplexity 77% of the time (Grow and Convert)
• Ranking #1 gives a page a 58% chance of an AI Overview citation (Originality.AI)
• Google processes 210x more searches than ChatGPT every day (SparkToro)
• AI referral traffic accounts for only ~1% of website traffic (Conductor)

Google drives more traffic than AI search. More searches happen on it every day. Google AI Overviews and AI Mode are grounded in Google’s same search index. And ranking highly in Google strongly impacts AI search visibility.

Why would you focus your entire strategy around AI-first and not SEO? 

Your strategy should be a foundation of SEO, then brand building, then experimental AI tactics. The highest-leverage thing you can do for your AEO strategy is to get your content to rank in Google. 

That sounds almost too simple. But it's what the data supports, and it's where I see brands under-invest because everyone is looking for a more interesting answer.

Now, where do you start? What keywords should you focus on? How can you get your content to rank? And how can you actually create “great” content (whatever that means)?

Let’s start with targeting the right keywords …

Keyword strategy

Ranking on page one requires you to do two things consistently well:

1. Identify the right keywords to target: terms your target audience searches, that you can actually rank for, and that will drive inbound conversions.
2. Create and publish high-quality content: Content that maps to search intent, is well written, and provides valuable, unique information (e.g., real-world experience, expert takes, proprietary data, helpful visuals, etc.). Not generic AI content.

First is identifying which keywords to target. Target keywords need to be defined before writing begins. This is because search intent and current ranking results will determine the shape of that content:

• What keyword should you target and why? Is this a keyword your target customers actually search? Will ranking for this keyword equal traffic (i.e., what is the search volume)? Will it lead to more inbound conversions (i.e., is it a high-intent search)?
• Keyword difficulty. How difficult will it be to rank for this keyword, and do you actually have a realistic chance to rank for it?
• Search intent. When people search this keyword, what type of content are they looking for?

These factors influence what type of content to create, what information to include, and whether or not you can actually rank. 

Avoid top-of-funnel content. Think definition, “what is” topics. Sure, these keywords get a lot of search volume. But informational topics trigger AI Overviews the most, and are easily answered by AI. 

According to Ahrefs' analysis of 300,000 keywords, AI Overviews appear on roughly one in five Google searches (Conductor’s report puts this at ~25%). 99.2% of keywords that trigger Google AI Overviews are informational in intent.

Someone searching “What is X?” doesn’t need to navigate to your website to learn more. AI easily provides a satisfactory answer.

Google something like “what is AEO” and you’ll get an AI Overview:

Do the same thing in ChatGPT, and you get a complete answer (all without any external links or citations mentioned):

Avoid these types of keywords.

Instead, focus on targeting high-intent searches. These are keywords where someone is actively looking for a solution (e.g., CATEGORY Tools, COMPETITOR Alternatives, COMPETITOR 1 Vs. COMPETITOR 2). 

Don’t get hung up on search volume. Low volume is fine if that keyword is highly relevant to your business and is high-intent. Searchers are in a buying motion, which means they’re more likely to convert.

These are the keywords you need to prioritize. 

There are only so many of these keywords, though, so from there, you can expand into more advice-based topics that help build authority in your niche. 

Here’s a tiered-system to help you prioritize topics and keywords:

• Tier 1 (Prioritize). These formats target buyers actively searching for and/or evaluating specific tools. They’ve identified that they have a problem and are seeking a solution. These deliver the highest return.
• Tier 2 (Develop Selectively). How-to guides, best practices, and checklists attract mid-funnel readers who are building their knowledge. They build brand authority and help position your brand as a thought leader.
• Tier 3 (Limit). Definition and high-level content serves early-funnel audiences with low buying intent. Google AI Overviews dominate these searches. Produce this content only when it serves a specific internal linking or topical authority purpose.

A note on “content clustering”...

Given that AI platforms now use fan-out queries, it makes sense to want to rank for a wider range of related keywords to give your brand a better chance to appear across these searches. 

The logic makes sense, and it’s a strategy that more brands and agencies are using. Conductor's State of AEO/GEO Report found that "scaling AI content generation to increase topical authority" ranked as the number one content priority for brands in 2026.

The approach looks like this: 

1. Identify a keyword cluster
2. Use AI to generate dozens of articles covering every variation of that topic as fast as possible
3. Publish them all
4. Wait for AI search visibility to follow

The problem isn't the strategy. It's the execution. And the reason comes back to content quality. Google's Quality Rater Guidelines explicitly state that scaled content produced with AI as "a low-effort way to generate many pages that add little-to-no value" is now classified as spam under Google's Web Spam Policies.

This reason this matters is because of the fan-out queries AI uses to generate responses. AI platforms run sub-queries during answer generation and pull citations from pages that appear in those search results. Content that doesn't rank doesn't show up in those results. It's invisible to the entire process. 

Publishing 50 thin articles to "capture a cluster" doesn't build topical authority. It builds a content graveyard.

Building a content niche has been an SEO best practice for years. But, the right practice looks like this: 

1. Pick a niche your brand has real expertise in
2. Identify 10 to 20 topics your audience is actually searching for within that niche
3. Publish the best, most experience-backed piece of content that exists on each one
4. Do that consistently over time. 

That builds topical authority, that's what gets ranked, and that's what ends up getting cited.

Creating great content

Anyone can use AI to write a 2,000-word blog post on any topic in just a few seconds. The bar for “quality” has shifted. 

The best way to stand out is to create high-quality content, written by experienced writers or practitioners in your field, providing unique insights (real-world experience, expert quotes, proprietary data, etc.).

Do you trust AI to create good, accurate content about your brand?

Now, I’m not going to tell you that you can’t use AI. I use it regularly for research and writing. But it’s a tool that, when used properly, will save you time and get you out of the “blank page” state. Left unchecked, though, it’ll produce mediocre, inaccurate content at best.

Think about what AI-generated content says about you, and how that content is read not only by AI bots, but by your actual customers. Is that content accurate? Does it have the most up-to-date information about your brand, products, and pricing? Does it understand how your product solves customer problems differently than competitors?

Yes, the content you create informs LLMs how to talk about and position your brand. But don’t forget that this content is still consumed by real readers (i.e., potential customers). Readers can tell when something is AI written. Don’t damage your brand reputation. Make sure everything that AI writes is accurate. 

No AI-generated content should go unchecked. There should always be a human in the loop.

All that said, AI or human created, the best content will align with Google’s E-E-A-T framework.

Satisfying Google’s E-E-A-T Framework

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It's the lens through which Google evaluates content quality. 

Google's Quality Rater Guidelines (last updated September 2025), made the implications for AI-generated content explicit. The January 2025 update states that the lowest quality rating now applies to content that is "copied or paraphrased from different sites, or AI-generated in a low-effort way," and to content that is "essentially filler created at scale meant to inflate a page's length without adding substance, regardless of if a human or AI created it." 

The problem isn't AI specifically, but low-effort, undifferentiated content. Yet, this is exactly the type of content that AI produces at scale.

The four components of the E-E-A-T framework matter in specific ways:

• Experience means first-hand, personal involvement with the topic. Did the person writing about enterprise SaaS implementation actually work in enterprise SaaS? AI cannot satisfy this guideline.
• Expertise means demonstrated knowledge and skill. Named, credentialed authors with verifiable professional backgrounds meet this guideline. Anonymous AI-generated content does not.
• Authoritativeness means recognition by others as a credible source. This is built externally through brand mentions, reviews, and third-party citations (Step 3 of this guide).
• Trustworthiness means accurate, well-sourced claims, transparency about who created the content, and a site that behaves like a legitimate publisher.

YMYL categories deserve special attention

YMYL stands for "Your Money or Your Life," Google's term for content where inaccurate information could cause real harm. This includes health and medical, personal finance and investing, legal advice, security, and safety information. 

Google's most recent Quality Rater Guideline updates tightened what's required in these categories, adding how AI-generated content in YMYL categories should be evaluated.

For YMYL content, raters apply rigorous E-E-A-T standards: 

• Medical content should involve licensed practitioners
• Financial guidance should come from certified professionals
• Legal information should be authored or reviewed by qualified attorneys

Quality Rater Guidelines instruct human raters, not the algorithm directly. But those rater evaluations are used to train Google's systems over time, which is why the standards in the E-E-A-T guidelines tend to show up in rankings, particularly after core updates. 

So, who should actually be writing your content?

Every piece of content you produce should be attributed to a named, credible author. Anonymous content signals lower trust to both readers and search engines.

In practice, the best content comes from one of the following:

• Practitioners writing directly. The best option is someone who actually does the thing they're writing about. A sales engineer writing about sales engineering. A security architect writing about threat detection. A CFO writing about financial planning. First-hand experience is the "first E" in E-E-A-T, and it's the one AI cannot replicate.
• Specialist writers with deep domain experience. Writers who have spent years covering your specific industry, understand the terminology, and can write with authority on the subject. Not generalist freelance writers who cover ten different industries.
• Real-world experience, expert quotes, unique insights and opinions, proprietary data, and informative visuals. Content should be supported by unique information, especially when neither of the above is feasible. This includes interviews with practitioners on your team (or in your network), direct quotes from credible subject matter experts, cited third-party research and data from reputable sources, and current statistics that anchor claims in evidence. The absence of an expert author needs to be compensated for by expert input woven throughout the content itself.

The third option is the minimum, not the goal. And for YMYL categories, health, finance, legal, and safety, it may not be enough.

Do & Don’t Checklist

Do:

• Use AI for research, ideation, and outlining
• Attribute every piece of content to a named, credible author
• Back up content with original data, expert quotes, and first-hand experience
• Use practicing professionals or specialist writers for technical or YMYL content
• Include author bios with verifiable credentials and relevant experience
• Work in expert input (interviews, quotes, cited research)
• Edit and fact-check all AI-assisted content before publishing

Don't:

• Publish AI-generated content without a human in the loop
• Use generic brand bylines or anonymous authors, especially on YMYL topics
• Rely on AI to accurately represent your brand's unique positioning and voice
• Treat AI-generated content as a finished product
• Scale content production at the expense of quality and originality
• Use AI to paraphrase or repackage existing content without adding original insight

Step 3: Build Off-Site Brand Authority

Next is building off-site brand authority. Only move onto this step once your SEO foundation is solid. You should have a keyword strategy, be consistently creating content every week, and getting that content to rank. Content is the biggest thing you can control, and the most influential.

The next biggest factor affecting your AI visibility is your brand, specifically off-site mentions. AI uses more than just your own website to generate an answer. It considers multiple sources, including competitor websites, earned media, industry publications, review sites, and social media like Reddit, X, and LinkedIn. 

What’s being said about your brand, and how often you’re mentioned, can affect how you are shown in AI answers.

Brand web mentions correlated 3x more strongly with AI visibility than backlinks

Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found that brand web mentions correlated three times more strongly with AI visibility than backlinks (correlation of 0.664 versus 0.218). 

Brands in the top 25% for web mentions averaged roughly 169 AI Overview mentions, compared to about 14 for the next quartile. That's over 10x more visibility.

It’s important to note that backlinks and Domain Rating haven't become irrelevant. Domain Rating still correlates with AI Overview visibility (around 0.33), and raw backlink counts correlate too, just more weakly (around 0.22 to 0.30). 

Other research, including SE Ranking's analysis of over 100,000 domains, found that sites with large referring-domain profiles were several times more likely to be cited by ChatGPT than sites with thin link profiles. 

A strong backlink profile still helps. What's changed is the relative weighting. A backlink is one site vouching for you with a link attached. A brand mention is one site vouching for you, period, link or no link. 

AI models are picking up on the broader pattern of "do credible sources talk about this brand," and a link is just one form of that. 

If you're already doing digital PR and earning backlinks, you're halfway there. The shift is to stop treating the link as the goal and start treating the mention itself, wherever it appears, as the goal.

LLMs build trust through corroboration

If only your own website says you're the best solution for a problem, an AI model treats that as a marketing claim and weighs it accordingly. When independent, credible sources say similar things about you, the model treats it as validated. 

The channels that matter most here, based on where AI models are actually citing sources:

• Reddit
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• Digital PR and Earned Media
• Third-party reviews: G2, Capterra, TrustPilot, etc.

Let’s go through each …

Reddit is the most cited domain across every major AI platform

Peec AI's March 2026 analysis of 30 million sources across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews, ranked Reddit as the #1 citation source across all five platforms. Profound's analysis of 4 billion AI citations in late 2025, also put Reddit at #1.

Part of the reason why Reddit is cited so often is likely due to how AI systems search for content.

Profound's analysis of ChatGPT fan-out data found that ChatGPT actively appends "reddit" as a keyword to its fan-out search queries when seeking answers to user prompts:

Reddit content is being deliberately retrieved as part of the answer-building process. 

“AI search engines trust Reddit because it captures authentic user experiences and discussions that feel more trustworthy than marketing content, with real people asking real questions and getting real answers.” - Tomek Rudzki, GEO Expert at Peec AI

It’s not just ChatGPT either. In its May 2026 AI Overviews update, Google built Reddit content more deeply into AI summaries, specifically including a preview sourced from public online discussions and social media:

As Google explains:

“For many searches, people are increasingly seeking out advice from others. To help you find the most helpful insights to explore further, AI responses will now include a preview of perspectives from public online discussions, social media, and other firsthand sources.”

If your brand isn't present in relevant Reddit communities, you could be left out of answers AI is actively going to Reddit to find. 

YouTube and LinkedIn are both in the top five citation sources

YouTube is the #2 most cited domain overall according to the Peec AI study. AI pulls from both video descriptions and auto-generated transcripts. Even shorter-form content on a brand's YouTube channel can end up cited in AI responses.

Semrush's March 2026 analysis, which focused specifically on professional and B2B query categories, put YouTube at #4:

LinkedIn ranks #3 overall in Peec AI's study, but comes in #2 Semrush's study.

Their rankings may fluctuate depending on the industry and datasets analyzed, but both consistently show up in the top five AI citation sources.

Digital PR and earned media in credible industry publications

Which publications and domains AI cites most varies by industry. 

In Healthcare, Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic dominate. In Finance, NerdWallet and Bankrate lead the rankings ahead of actual banks (likely because of their deep libraries of long-form educational content). In IT, Google and Microsoft top the list (their technical documentation is authoritative and exhaustive). 

The key takeaway is that getting mentioned on two or three publications that AI has decided are authoritative in your category could be worth more than dozens of placements in mid-tier outlets. 

The question to answer is, “Which domains is AI citing when someone asks a question in your category?”

Third-party review platforms like G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot

SE Ranking's November 2025 analysis found domains with active profiles on G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot have 3x higher ChatGPT citation rates than domains without. Seer Interactive's May 2026 research found that brands with even a minimal Trustpilot profile (as few as 1–13 reviews) have a 53.5% median AI citation rate, compared to just 1% for brands with no profile at all. 

For B2B SaaS specifically, G2 is the only review platform to crack the overall top 10 most-cited domains in Peec AI's study:

G2’s analysis of 30,000 AI citations across 500 G2 software categories found that categories with 10% more reviews earn 2% more citations on average. 

This highlights that brand authority, content quality, and cross-web mentions do most of the heavy lifting. But data shows that having an active, maintained profile on the right platforms still matters. For B2B SaaS, G2 should be your priority. Broader consumer-facing brands should also consider Trustpilot and Capterra. 

Building brand authority is nothing new

Brand building has always been important for SEO. 

The weighting has shifted, but the logic is still the same. Build a reputable, instantly recognizable brand, and you’ll be shown more often. 

Independent off-site sources validate your brand, and your brand gets included. That's been true for Google for years. It's true for AI search now. Some sources now just have increased importance (e.g., Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, G2, etc.).

Start with the top citation sources in your industry and the channels where your customers are most active. For most B2B SaaS brands, that's usually Reddit, LinkedIn, or G2. Pick the one where your current presence is smallest, and go deep on that channel first. Build a consistent presence before moving to the next one.

Step 4: Measure Google & AI Search Performance Together

Most brands are tracking Google rankings in one tool, AI visibility in another, and never connecting either to actual conversions. 

It’s hard to blame them. There are easily over 50 AI search visibility tools, and many only do AI prompt tracking. Which means you also need a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush for Google rank tracking. Then, you need web and conversion analytics from something like GA4, HubSpot, or PostHog. 

It’s a mess. But it’s critical that you have a clean way to view and measure all of this data.

The goal is one unified dashboard: organic rankings, AI visibility, Google traffic, AI referral traffic, combined traffic, and inbound conversions together. 

Traffic in isolation is a vanity metric. You need to be able to answer:

“Is traffic going up and to the right, and is that traffic actually leading to qualified inbound conversions?”

That is your north star.

I recommend creating a dashboard that has at least the following:

• Organic search traffic (Traffic from Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, etc.)
• AI referral traffic (Traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, etc.)
• Combined organic and AI traffic.
• Monthly total inbound conversions (e.g., Demo requests, signups, purchases, etc.). 
• Total inbound conversions by source (Direct, organic, social, email). This identifies which channels are most effective.
• First page seen by inbound conversion. Which page did conversions first visit on your website? 
• First blog post seen by inbound conversion. Which blog post did conversions first visit on your website?
• First page/blog seen by demo request - X day comparison. I’d recommend a 60-90 day comparison to the previous period. This will let you know if any of your top converting pages are slipping.

This gives you an easy-to-read, quick snapshot of your performance. Then, you can layer in keyword rankings and AI prompt visibility for a more granular look at what’s driving these metrics.

Step 5: Layer On AI-Specific Optimization Last

Last is AI-specific optimization, and it’s last for a reason. Much of the reported impact of AI optimizations is anecdotal at best. There’s not much actual data that supports many of the strategies that “AEO experts” on LinkedIn and X are promoting.

Beyond that, some are just good general writing practices that you should be doing anyway (e.g., getting to the point quicker, using concise language, supporting claims with factual evidence, etc.)

None of what follows belongs at the top of your priority list until your SEO foundation is solid. If you're doing the first four steps well, this is where you can fine-tune your content for AI. But if you're not, these tweaks won't save you. 

With that caveat out the way, here's what the more credible evidence points to …

Answer-first formatting

Put a direct, concise answer in the first 40 to 60 words of every key page. 

Kevin Indig's February 2026 analysis of 3 million ChatGPT responses, found a consistent "ski ramp" pattern: 

• 44.2% of ChatGPT citations come from the first 30% of a page's content
• The middle 30–70% contributes 31.1%
• The final 30% accounts for just 24.7% 

AI models heavily weight the opening of a document during retrieval. Writing a self-contained answer before the explanation gives AI something clean to extract.

Clear content structure and hierarchy

A March 2026 peer-reviewed study from the University of Tokyo and University of Tsukuba found that structural changes, independent of what the content actually says, produced a consistent 17.3% improvement in citation rates across six generative engines. 

The key structural levers were clear heading hierarchy, shorter paragraphs with one claim per block, and data in tables rather than buried in prose.

These formatting choices are not only good for human readers (which help make content easier to read and scan), they also make it easier for AI systems to parse and extract content.

Factual claim density

Include specific statistics, named sources, and attributed data points throughout your content. 

The GEO-SFE research found this consistently improved citation probability across engines, and it also aligns with Google's E-E-A-T guidelines. 

Kevin Indig’s research support this too:

“Typical English text contains 5% to 8% proper nouns. Heavily cited text averaged 20.6%. Specific brands, tools, and people anchor answers and reduce ambiguity.”

Vague claims get skipped. Specific, sourced claims get cited.

Content freshness

Ahrefs' analysis of 17 million AI citations found that AI-cited content is 25.7% fresher on average than traditionally ranked organic content, with 76.4% of ChatGPT's most-cited pages having been updated within the last 30 days. 

Seer Interactive's October 2025 crawl analysis reinforces this from the AI bot-behavior side: 

• 65% of AI crawler hits target content published within the past year
• 79% from the last two years
• 6% on content older than six years

One reason could be AI injection of the current year into fan-out queries.

Qwairy's analysis of 102,018 AI-generated queries found that AI systems automatically inject the current year into 28.1% of sub-queries even when users didn't include it, with "2026" appearing 184 times more often than "2025".

Freshness isn't just a nice-to-have. Outdated content is being filtered out of retrieval pools regardless of how well it ranks.

FAQPage schema

Many AEO “experts” claim FAQPage schema improves AI citation rates. 

But Ahrefs' May 2026 study, which tracked 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD schema against 4,000 control pages, found no statistically significant citation improvement, and actually a small 4.6% decline in AI Overviews. 

Regular prompt testing

Run your brand's key queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot regularly. 

How is your brand showing up? Is it being cited accurately? Are competitors appearing on queries where you should be? 

AI search visibility tools like Profound, Peec AI, and Ahrefs Brand Radar will automate this task and show how often your brand appears across tracked prompts, which AI engines are citing you, and your share of voice across your prompt set. 

It’s the AI equivalent of rank tracking, except instead of monitoring keyword positions in Google, you're monitoring brand visibility across the prompts that are important to your business (i.e. questions that customers are asking).

The Brands Winning In AI Search Didn't Find A Hack

Let me bring this back to where we started.

The SEO industry has developed a habit of repackaging fundamentals under new acronyms every time a new technology arrives. We've been through this cycle before. The tactics change at the edges, but the core of what drives visibility doesn't. 

The brands I see showing up in AI aren't there because they found some AEO or GEO hack. They got there because their SEO foundation is strong, they produce high-quality content, they rank on page one, and independent sources back up their authority. That's it.

Here's the five-step summary: 

1. Confirm crawlers can access your site and you don’t have any glaring technical SEO issues
2. Target the right keywords, publish quality content backed by real experience, and rank
3. Build brand authority through digital PR, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, and third-party reviews
4. Measure Google and AI performance together against inbound conversions
5. Layer on AI-specific tactics like answer-first formatting and prompt testing

AI search will keep growing. Visibility tools will improve. Specific optimizations will continue to evolve. But the foundation will stay the same, because the goal of AI search and traditional search is identical: provide content that satisfies the user's query. 

The brands that do that consistently will keep winning, in every format search takes.

If you want help building that foundation, I work with SaaS brands specifically on this. Get in touch with me here.