The AEO Starter Guide.

Why it matters now

AI search isn’t coming. It’s here.

ChatGPT processes over 2 billion queries daily. Google AI Overviews now appear in over 20% of all searches. Perplexity has grown from zero to hundreds of millions of queries per month in under three years. According to Similarweb, AI platforms generated over 1.1 billion referral visits in June 2025 alone — up 357% year over year.

The brands being recommended in those answers today are building compounding authority. The brands that wait are making the same mistake businesses made when they ignored SEO in the early 2000s.

How AI models decide who to recommend

LLMs don’t rank brands the way Google ranks pages. They build a model of the world from everything they’ve ingested — your website, third-party directories, reviews, press mentions, and structured data. When a buyer asks for a recommendation, the model surfaces brands it recognizes as authoritative, consistent, and relevant to that specific query.

Three things determine whether your brand gets cited:

Structured content

Does your website directly answer the questions buyers ask AI? Generic marketing copy gets ignored. Content that matches buyer queries in plain, structured language gets cited. FAQ pages, comparison pages, use-case pages, and category landing pages are the formats AI models favor most.

Entity consistency

Does your brand appear consistently across the web? Your name, description, category, founding year, and key facts should match across your website, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, G2, Google Business Profile, and every platform AI models cross-reference. Inconsistency creates uncertainty. Uncertainty means the model skips you.

Citation authority

Are credible third-party sources referencing your brand? AI models treat external mentions as trust signals. A brand referenced in authoritative publications, industry directories, and partner pages is treated as more credible than one that only describes itself on its own website.

The AEO Checklist

This is what good AI visibility looks like in practice. Work through each item and you’ll cover the fundamentals.

1. Audit your current AI visibility

Before you optimize anything, find out where you stand.

Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Type the queries your buyers actually use — not branded searches, but category searches. Things like:

Note which brands appear. Note whether you appear. Note what the AI says about you when you search your brand name directly. This is your baseline.

2. Fix your website content

Your website is the foundation. AI models read it and use it to understand who you are and what you do.

Write a clear “What we do” page

One page that plainly explains what your product or service does, who it’s for, what problems it solves, and how it works. No jargon. No marketing speak. Write it the way you’d explain it to a smart friend who has never heard of you.

Build an FAQ page

This is one of the highest-leverage AEO assets you can create. Write 10 to 20 questions your buyers actually ask — the real ones, not softballs — and answer each one in 2 to 4 sentences. Use plain language. Structure each answer to stand alone.

AI models love FAQ content because it directly matches the question-and-answer format of how people query them.

Create comparison pages

Buyers ask AI to compare options. If you don’t have a page that addresses how you compare to alternatives, you’re leaving that conversation entirely to your competitors.

Build pages for your most common comparisons. Keep them honest — acknowledge tradeoffs. AI models cite balanced content more than promotional content.

Write use-case pages

Each major use case your product or service addresses should have its own page. Not a generic features page — a specific page that explains: who this is for, what problem it solves, how it works, and what outcome they can expect.

3. Set up your technical foundation

Add schema markup

Schema is structured data that tells AI models and search engines exactly what your brand is, what it does, and how to categorize it. The most important schemas to implement are:

These go in the <head> of your site as JSON-LD script tags. Most website platforms have plugins or built-in tools to add them.

Create an llms.txt file

This is a plain text file at yourdomain.com/llms.txt that tells AI models about your brand in their native format. Think of it as a README for AI crawlers.

A basic llms.txt includes: who you are, what you do, who you serve, your key services or products, frequently asked questions, and your contact details. There is a growing standard for this format at llmstxt.org.

Check your robots.txt

Make sure you’re not accidentally blocking AI crawlers. The main ones to explicitly allow are GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, and GoogleOther (Google AI). Your robots.txt should have explicit allow rules for each.

Submit your sitemap

Make sure Google Search Console has your current sitemap submitted. This helps Google AI Overviews find and index your content correctly.

4. Build your entity presence

Entity presence means showing up consistently across the platforms AI models use to verify and understand businesses.

Start with these:

LinkedIn company page

Keep it updated. Your description, industry category, and website URL should match what’s on your website exactly. AI models cross-reference LinkedIn heavily for B2B brands.

Crunchbase

Claim and complete your Crunchbase profile. Include your founding year, description, category, location, and website. This is one of the most cited sources in ChatGPT responses for business queries.

Google Business Profile

Even if you’re not a local business, claim and complete your profile. Include your category, description, and website. Google AI Overviews pull from this directly.

Industry-specific directories

Depending on your category, get listed on the dominant review platform for your industry. For software: G2 and Capterra. For agencies and services: Clutch. For general business: Yelp and BBB. AI models consistently reference the leading directory for each industry.

5. Build third-party citations

AI models weight external mentions heavily. A brand that only exists on its own website is easy to ignore. A brand that appears across authoritative third-party sources is treated as credible.

Start building citations through:

Guest content

Write articles for publications in your industry. When your brand name appears in a credible third-party publication alongside context about what you do and who you serve, AI models register that as an authority signal.

Press mentions

Even small press mentions help. A feature in an industry newsletter, a quote in a trade publication, or a mention in a roundup post all add to your citation footprint.

Partner and customer mentions

Ask partners and customers to mention you on their websites where relevant. A client case study on their site, a partner page listing, or a testimonial that includes your brand name all count.

Community presence

Participate in communities where your buyers ask questions — Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, industry forums. When your brand is part of genuine conversations in the places buyers go for answers, AI models notice.

6. Track your progress

AEO is measurable. You don’t need expensive tools to start.

Manual tracking

Run the same 10 to 15 queries you used in your initial audit every two to four weeks. Keep a simple spreadsheet. Note whether you appear, where you appear, and what the AI says about you. Look for trends over time.

What good looks like

First citations typically appear within 45 to 60 days of structured optimization work. Broader category terms take 2 to 4 months. Share of voice — how often you appear relative to competitors across a set of queries — is the metric that compounds most meaningfully over time.

Common mistakes to avoid

Keyword stuffing for AI

The same mistake people made with early SEO. AI models are better at detecting low-quality, repetitive content than Google ever was. Write for humans. Structure for machines.

Ignoring entity consistency

Many brands focus only on their website and neglect their third-party profiles. A perfectly optimized website won’t overcome inconsistent or missing entity data across the platforms AI models cross-reference.

Treating AEO as a one-time project

AI models update their training data and retrieval systems continuously. AEO is ongoing. Brands that publish consistently, build citations regularly, and maintain entity consistency over time outperform those that do a one-time cleanup.

Optimizing only for ChatGPT

Different AI models pull from different sources with different weightings. What works on ChatGPT doesn’t always translate directly to Perplexity or Gemini. Aim for breadth across platforms, not depth on one.

Where to go from here

This guide covers the fundamentals. Implementing everything here will meaningfully improve your AI visibility over 60 to 90 days.

If you want to go deeper — prompt-level tracking, competitor share of voice analysis, citation gap auditing, or full execution — that’s where specialized help makes sense.

A good starting point regardless: run the manual audit in step one right now. Open ChatGPT, type your category queries, and see what comes back. Most brands are surprised by what they find.