AEO guides
Seventeen pages on getting named and cited in AI answers — the buyer questions answered directly, the tools compared including where we are the wrong choice, the vocabulary defined, and our own audited score of zero with the method behind it.
These are the same explanations we give clients. If you would rather do the work yourself, they are enough to start, and several of them say plainly when not to pay us. Every number on them carries a date and a source.
Start here
The foundations
If you read three pages, read these. The first explains the field, the second shows it applied to us with the worst possible result, and the third gives you the arithmetic so you can check both.
What is Answer Engine Optimization?
How AEO differs from SEO, the four things that actually move it, and the three numbers worth measuring.
Read the guide →Our own AI visibility score is 0
Named in 0 of 8 Perplexity answers. The whole run: the questions, the brands named instead, the 90 sources cited.
Read the audit →How we measure AI visibility
The exact formula — 50% mention rate, 30% citation share, 20% position — two worked examples, and what it cannot see.
Read the method →How to get mentioned by ChatGPT and Perplexity
Seven steps in order, from listing the real questions to fixing the worst one each month.
Read the guide →Buyer questions
Questions people ask before buying
One page per question, titled as the question, answered in the first two sentences. These are the questions our own audit showed us losing.
How much does AEO cost per month?
Four price bands from $0 to $25,000+, what drives the spread, and what our own $99 does not include.
Read the answer →AEO for a small business on a budget
The free method in full, when a $29 tracker starts to earn its price, and when not to pay anyone — us included.
Read the answer →Who tracks how often AI assistants cite my website?
Which engines can be measured at all, which have no API, and why analytics referral data is not citation data.
Read the answer →Who provides AEO as a service?
The four jobs a real service does, the three shapes providers come in, and what is sold as AEO but is not.
Read the answer →Comparisons
Choosing between the options
Including ourselves, and including the readers for whom a competitor is the better buy. Where a price is something an engine reported rather than something we checked, the page says so.
AEO tools compared
Profound, Peec, Otterly, AthenaHQ, Scrunch and us — with five situations where we are the wrong choice.
Read the comparison →Alternatives to Profound
Seven options grouped by the decision that separates them, with reported prices and when to stay put.
Read the comparison →Profound vs Peec AI
Enterprise platform against self-serve tracker. What an engine said when asked to choose, and six demo questions.
Read the head-to-head →AEO vs SEO
What overlaps, what genuinely differs, how the metrics map — and why you should do SEO first.
Read the comparison →Definitions
The vocabulary
Short, precise, and each term set against the one it gets confused with — because that confusion is where the reporting errors start.
AEO glossary
Sixteen terms defined: answer engine, grounding, prompt set, share of voice, zero-click, entity consistency and more.
Read the glossary →What is citation share?
The formula, a worked example with real audited numbers, and why it is the metric you can move fastest.
Read the definition →What is llms.txt, and does it work?
A proposal, not a standard. How it differs from robots.txt, and why we publish one with no evidence it helps.
Read the definition →GEO vs AEO
Two names for nearly the same work. Where each came from, the other names for it, and which to use.
Read the definition →Market
Philippines
The one market page we have earned, because the acronym itself means something else here.
What is not here yet, and why
A library is only useful if the pages in it have something in them. Three things we have deliberately not written:
- Pages for individual industries — AEO for law firms, for SaaS, for e-commerce. We have no client data in any of those verticals, and a page with the noun swapped and nothing else changed is worthless and obvious. The honest way to earn them is to run our audit with a vertical-specific question set and publish what comes back. That is the plan.
- “How long does AEO take to work?” A real question. We have one month of our own data and no client history long enough to answer it. Any number we published today would be invention. Ask us again after the third monthly audit, when the answer can be a chart.
- More head-to-head comparisons — Otterly vs AthenaHQ, and the rest. Each needs first-hand knowledge of both products that we do not have, and building them out of an engine’s summary would be laundering someone else’s opinion as our comparison.
We would rather have seventeen pages that answer something than forty that hold keywords. A page an engine retrieves once and finds empty is a reason not to come back.
Or skip the reading
Enter your domain. We ask Perplexity three of your buyers’ questions and show you who gets named, and what it would take to be one of them.
3 questions on Perplexity, free. A domain checked in the last week is served from that stored run rather than asked again, and the daily free allowance resets at midnight UTC.