I asked what you wanted to learn from me, and this was the #1 requested topic. So let’s dive right into it.

Open ChatGPT. Type the exact question your best buyer would type. Something like: "What's the best [your category] for a [customer persona]?"

Did your brand name show up?

Maybe it didn't. Or worse: it mentioned you but got your info completely wrong, describing you as the thing you stopped being two pivots ago.

There's already a version of your brand living inside these AI models. It's your job, as the person tasked with "figure out AEO," to make sure that version is correct, up to date, and cross-verified by people outside your brand.

You do not need the 4,000-step checklist that every "Complete Guide to AEO" is trying to sell you. You need a handful of moves in the right order.

You can't fix what you haven't seen, so go look at what the different models actually say about you/your brand.

Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Mode. Ask all four the same ten questions. Not "what is [category]." The real ones your potential buyers ask:

Screenshot everything. Congratulations, you now have three lists:

That's your map. Every move after this is just closing those three gaps. Do it again bi-weekly or monthly, because the models update daily as new content is published.

One thing to know before you panic at a bad result: AI answers are probabilistic. (I will do a deep dive on this in the future, but I’ll keep it high-level today.)

Run the same prompt twice, and you can get two different lists. So don't read one screenshot like it's gospel. Run each question two or three times, and pay attention to the pattern, not the one-off. 

If you're invisible in three out of three runs, that's a signal. If you're in one out of three, that's a foothold you can grow.

AI will not confidently recommend a brand it can't pin down.

If your homepage says "revenue intelligence platform," your G2 review page says "sales analytics software," and your LinkedIn bio is still wearing its 2021 tagline, the model has no idea who you are. Your buyers are probably confused, too.

LLMs like brands or individuals with a story that’s clean and boring and consistent.

Do this today:

It's the least exciting hour in this whole plan, but it's also the hour that makes every other move actually work.

Note: I personally have had to do this gruntwork for my own "personal brand" (air quotes because that feels so stupid to write! I am just a girl, not a brand, but…alas.)

With this new pivot into AEO, I've had to go back and get alllll my important old bios updated across the places that matter, because it's crucial for LLMs that you're consistent in how you show up across the internet. Unsexy work, but very important.

Start with the owned content side of AEO (namely your blog), and update/refresh/optimize your top-performing pieces that are already ranking and driving website traffic. This is your low-hanging fruit.

The biggest thing to keep in mind for AEO work here: Every page that matters should answer the question in the first two sentences, then expand. Journalists call it the inverted pyramid. You should call it the thing that gets you cited.

Here's what it looks like in action: "[Category] software helps [buyer] do [job]. For [your segment], the right pick comes down to three things. Here's how to choose."

Start with your top ten pieces or the ones tied to actual buying decisions. Lead with the answer in the first/top section. No runway, no warm-up, no "in this article we'll explore." Get to the point!

It also doesn’t hurt to add a FAQ section to the end of each of these articles, either.

This is the highest-leverage move on the list, and almost nobody does it.

You’re sitting on a gold mine you keep ignoring: your product usage data, your customer outcomes, your benchmarks, the customer behavioral shifts and patterns you spot in your own support tickets.

Pull one interesting finding from your data set and build a report or post around that insight.

One original data finding, published with a solid explanation and context attached, will earn more AI citations than "ultimate" guides. Why? Because it’s unique, data-backed, and ONLY YOU CAN HAVE IT. If you were a journalist, you’d consider this your “scoop,” AKA the insider angle only you have.

AI tools, when evaluating sources, increasingly favor people, not faceless company brands. A real expert with real credentials beats a faceless byline every time.

So: Put a real, human byline on every new piece of content you publish. A name, a photo, a two-line bio with credentials that aren't made up. Push your sharpest employee expert out front, publishing consistently in the thing they're actually an expert in. Or, if you’re using freelancers or B2B creators, spotlight their expertise.

Think about what subject matter expertise from internal employees you can leverage that adds something new to the conversation. Don’t be part of the B2B content monoculture.

Plot twist: most of your AI citations won't come from your own site. They'll come from everyone else's.

This is the whole premise behind my framework, the Source Signal Stack: the further a source is from brand control, the more trustworthy it is to an AI model.

Plus, data shows that much of what’s actually moving the needle in the realm of AEO is happening on third-party/off-site locations, like Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Start thinking about how you’re regularly showing up in these places. You need to be there!

Hot tip: Off-site has been notoriously hard to track, but this new tool Sauce (still in beta, but you can request access), has been INCREDIBLY helpful at keeping tabs on what’s getting AI citations beyond the company website.

Now let’s talk measurement. Forget rankings and traffic for a minute, as they aren’t as relevant in the AEO conversation. In fact, Ahrefs data shows only about 12% of the URLs ChatGPT cites also rank in Google's top 10. You need a new scoreboard.

There are two halves to this:

Answering these will help you answer whether or not AEO work is driving leads and sales (and, therefore, making a case for why it’s worth doing.)

Here are the visibility metrics I like to keep an eye on:

One critical point here: track this per engine, not as one blurry average. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Mode do not behave the same way, and the differences are big enough to change your strategy. If you blend all four engines into one score, you'll optimize for the average and win nowhere. Break it out.

Now, for the business side of things. Two key ones to watch:

Check the visibility metrics against your Move 1 screenshots monthly. Mentions flat? Your entity's still messy; go back to Move 2.

Mentioned but never cited? You need more original data and named humans; that's Moves 4 and 5. 

Let's make this concrete. Say you've just taken over marketing at "Ledgerly," a mid-size expense-management tool for finance teams at fast-growing startups. Decent product, modest brand, a homepage that's been quietly rewritten three times by three different founders. 

Here's what the first 90 days look like.

The audit (week one). I open all four engines and ask the ten questions a startup finance lead would actually ask: "best expense management software for startups," "Ledgerly vs [two named competitors]," "expense tools that integrate with [popular accounting platform]," and so on. I run each two or three times because, again, the answers fluctuate.

What I find is depressingly typical, and it sorts cleanly into the three buckets:

Now I have my map. Here's the 90 days.

Days 1–30: Fix the entity and the foundation. This is unglamorous Move 2 work, and it comes first because nothing else compounds until it's done. One sentence describing exactly what Ledgerly is now, pasted identically across the homepage, G2, Capterra, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, and every founder bio. Kill the "corporate card" language everywhere it still lingers. Then rewrite the top five money pages answer-first (Move 3), the comparison pages especially, since those are where buyers are closest to deciding. By day 30, the model should at least be able to pin down what Ledgerly is.

Days 31–60: Build the asset only Ledgerly has. This is the Move 4 swing for the fences. Ledgerly is sitting on anonymized spend data across thousands of startups, so we publish "The State of Startup Spend" with one genuinely original, quotable number ("startups waste X% of software budget on duplicate SaaS subscriptions"). Real methodology, real context, a named human analyst on the byline (Move 5). This is the page designed to get cited elsewhere, which is the whole point. In parallel, I pull the list of sites the engines kept citing in my audit and start pitching them, leading with that stat and an expert quote, not a press release.

Days 61–90: Earn the outside citations and re-measure. Now I chase the rooms the models already trust (Move 6). Contributed pieces and expert quotes on the two or three outlets my audit flagged, plus an outreach push to get Ledgerly onto that review listicle that keeps getting cited. I’d also start thinking about engaging creators on LinkedIn, getting a Reddit strategy in place, and building out a YouTube strategy with videos targeting key customer questions or topics Ledgerly is trying to own within the vertical.

And then I’d close the loop: I re-run the same ten prompts from week one and lay the screenshots side by side. 

This is a LOT…I know. But start small by getting the lay of the land with your audit. From there, you can start chipping away at the next moves one at a time.

What follow-up questions did this stir up for you? Hit reply and let me know.

‘Til next time,

Kaleigh Moore