A post on r/SEO this fall drew 139 comments. The question: a client wants AEO, the agency has never done it, so how do you actually go about it? If you’re a marketer whose boss just asked for AEO, you’ve probably wondered the same thing.
The top answer started with two words: “Baseline first.”
That’s right. It’s also the step most guides skip. They give you ten AEO strategies (write answer-first content, add schema, get cited by answer engines) and no order to do them in. This post is the order. It’s what the first 30 days of an answer engine optimization engagement look like at BCC, week by week, including what we skip and what 30 days can’t tell you.
Key Takeaways
Week one is measurement, not fixes. A fixed set of 25 to 30 buyer questions, run in every answer engine you care about, plus Search Console, GA4 and Bing set up to catch AI traffic.
Run every question more than once. SparkToro found less than a 1 in 100 chance that an AI tool gives the same brand list twice. One answer is one draw.
Week two is a source audit. Find the sites answer engines cite for your questions. Those sites, not your homepage, are usually where the work is.
Week three is a ranked fix list, sorted by what's costing you recommendations now. It includes a list of what not to do.
Week four makes the first fixes crawler access, wrong facts, a few pages rewritten to answer first, and outreach to the sites AI already trusts.
Thirty days builds the strategy. It doesn't prove it worked. AI citations change daily, so judge the trend over months.
What An AEO Strategy Is, And How It's Different From SEO
An AEO strategy is a plan for getting your business named, described accurately and cited when people ask answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews about your category. Some people call the same work GEO, for generative engine optimization. Either way, it answers four questions:
- Which buyer questions matter?
- What do AI models say about you today?
- Which sources are they using to say it?
- What do you change first?
Is AEO replacing SEO? No, and AI search isn’t a separate channel you can win without it. Google says optimizing for its generative AI features “is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.” AI Overviews and AI Mode pull from Google’s search index, so a page that never makes it into Google’s search results can’t be cited there. AEO builds on SEO (search engine optimization), including the technical SEO that gets pages crawled. What changes: traditional SEO focuses on ranking a page, and AEO focuses on whether AI-generated answers name you. That changes what you measure and adds off-site work most SEO plans skip.
Week 1: Build The Baseline
Nothing changes on the site in week one. If you fix things before you measure, you’ll never know what worked.
The Prompt Set
We write 25 to 30 questions a buyer would actually type, in their words, not the keyword list from your SEO tool. A Google search query is often a few words. A question to ChatGPT is often a full sentence with context. The rules:
- Leave the brand name out of most of them. “Best SEO agency for dental practices” tests whether you get recommended. “Is [brand] any good?” only tests how you’re described.
- Cover the whole buying process: problem questions (“why is my phone not ringing”), category questions (“best X for Y”), comparison questions (“[you] vs. [competitor]”) and reputation questions (“is [you] legit”).
- Add a few brand questions on purpose, like “What does [brand] do?” They check accuracy, not visibility, and they’re how you find out AI has your services or service area wrong.
- Lock it. The same questions get run every month after this. Change them and you lose the comparison.
We map every question to BCC’s 4 C’s, so the baseline shows where you’re weak, not just whether you showed up:
| The C | What it asks | Example question |
|---|---|---|
| Clarity | Does AI know what you do? | What does [brand] do? |
| Context | Does AI know who you're for? | Best [service] for [your type of customer] |
| Comparison | Do you make the shortlist? | [Brand] vs. [competitor] for [use case] |
| Citation | Is AI using your pages as the source? | How much does [service] cost in [city]? |
Run It In Each Engine, More Than Once
We run the set in each AI engine that matters to your buyers: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google (AI Overviews and AI Mode), in a logged-out or private window so past chats don’t shape the answer. Each question runs at least three times per engine.
Why so many runs? SparkToro and Gumshoe had 600 volunteers run 12 prompts 2,961 times. The brand lists almost never repeated, but how often a brand appeared across many runs held steady. Kevin Indig’s analysis of Omnia data on 20,000 prompts found only 2.37% of cited URLs showed up in all three of ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews. So score each engine separately. A blended “AI visibility score” hides more than it shows.
For every answer we log four things: mentioned, cited with a link, recommended, and which competitors showed up instead. The full scoring method is in how to measure GEO performance.
When we built this process, we ran it on BCC. Asked for the best AEO agencies for small and mid-sized businesses, ChatGPT named ten agencies. We weren't one of them. That's a normal day-one result for most businesses, including ones that rank fine on Google. A baseline is supposed to be humbling. That's what makes it useful.
Set Up The Free Reports
AI traffic hides in reports you already have. In week one we turn on or check four of them:
| Report | What it shows | What it misses |
|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console generative AI report | Impressions from AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI in Discover, by page, country and date. Open to all sites since August 31, 2026 | No clicks or queries yet. Google says it may add metrics over time |
| GA4 "AI Assistant" channel | Visits from AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude that pass a referrer. Added May 2026 | Visits with no referrer land in Direct, so it undercounts |
| ChatGPT's UTM tag | ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to search referral links, per OpenAI | Some links, like pages opened in Thinking mode, carry no tag |
| Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance | How often your pages are cited in Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI summaries, which pages, and the queries the AI used to find them. In public preview since February 2026 | Citations only, no clicks |
Then we tie it to money. If GA4 key events don’t track form fills and calls correctly, AI traffic numbers can’t be connected to leads. We fix that in week one, because every report after this depends on it. (AI Overview tracking covers the paid trackers if you want more than the free reports.)
Check That AI Can Read The Site
Last, a quick technical check. Does robots.txt allow OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT’s search crawler) and PerplexityBot? Does your firewall or CDN block what robots.txt allows? OpenAI says to confirm your host allows its published IP addresses, and security tools like Cloudflare can block AI bots with one setting. If a crawler is blocked, nothing else on this list matters. (The full crawler setup is in how to rank on ChatGPT.)
Get The 15-Minute Version Of Week One
Our free AI Visibility Playbook is the do-it-yourself version of this baseline. It includes copy-paste prompts for ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, a tracker, and a scoring rubric built on the 4 C's. It shows you how AI sees your business today. Fixing what it finds is the work we do.
Get the free playbookWeek 2: Audit The Sources AI Trusts
The baseline tells you what answer engines say. Week two finds out why. The answer usually isn’t on your own site.
We pull every citation from the baseline runs and sort the sources by type. For most businesses the list looks nothing like their own backlink profile. When Ahrefs analyzed 750 recommendation prompts in ChatGPT, “best X” list articles made up 43.8% of the source pages. Seer Interactive counted differently and got 16.6%, falling over the winter. The exact share is contested. That third-party pages carry a lot of the weight isn’t.
| Source type | What we check | What usually comes next |
|---|---|---|
| Your own pages | Which pages get cited, and for which questions | Rewrite the ones that get cited for the wrong thing |
| Lists and roundups | Are you on them? Who wrote them? When were they updated? | Outreach to get added or corrected |
| Review and directory sites | Claimed, complete, and do they match your site? | Fix listings first, it's fast |
| Forums (Reddit, Quora) | Which threads get cited, and what they say about you | Honest participation, never fake accounts |
| Competitor pages | Which of their pages AI cites for your questions | Find what they answer that you don't |
| News and industry sites | Mentions, interviews, associations | Digital PR targets for month two |
We also audit facts. Every place AI might read about you (your site, Google Business Profile, Yelp, LinkedIn, directories, old press) gets checked for your name, services, locations, hours and who you serve. When those disagree, AI guesses. That’s the Clarity and Context side of the 4 C’s, and it’s often the fastest win. (Process here: what to do when ChatGPT gets your business wrong.)
Week 3: Rank The Fixes
By week three there’s usually a list of 30 or more possible fixes. The job is putting them in order. This isn’t a new content strategy. It’s a short list of what to optimize first.
We score each one on three things: how many baseline questions it touches, how much it costs you now (a wrong fact in every answer beats a missing mention in one), and effort. The result is a ranked roadmap, top to bottom. A typical top of the list:
- Unblock anything AI can’t crawl. Minutes of work, and it blocks everything else.
- Fix wrong or conflicting facts on the sites AI cited in week two.
- Rewrite the pages AI already cites so the direct answer sits in the title, the first heading and the first two sentences, with a structure that’s easy to scan.
- Build the missing pages for questions where competitors get cited and you have nothing to cite.
- Start outreach to the lists and directories that showed up most in the source audit.
Every roadmap also gets a "don't" list. No llms.txt file, no AI-only copies of pages, and no schema sold as an AI shortcut. Google's own guidance says you don't need special AI text files or special schema, and "You don't need to write in a specific way just for generative AI search." We also skip the self-ranking "best X" list with you at number one. Ahrefs tested it on itself: 43% of AI answers citing its conference-promotion pages never mentioned the conference. The page got the citation and a competitor got the recommendation.
Week 4: Make The First Fixes
Week four is where things change, on your site and off it. This is the part of an answer engine optimization program most people picture when they hear the term. What gets done depends on the roadmap, but it usually includes:
- Technical: crawler access confirmed, robots.txt and firewall rules aligned, key pages indexed in Google and Bing.
- Facts: listings claimed and corrected, one version of your name, services and service area everywhere.
- Content: three to five of the most-cited or most-needed pages rewritten to give a direct answer first, with specifics (prices or ranges, service areas, who it’s for). We structure content so each section answers one question under a clear heading, which makes it easier for AI systems to quote. Tactics to optimize content are in our LLM SEO guide.
- Off-site: the first round of outreach to the lists, directories and publications from week two.
At day 30 the client gets the baseline, the source audit, the ranked roadmap, what got done, and what’s planned next. Where it goes from there depends on the business. Some teams take the roadmap and run it themselves. Others hand us the next phase. Either way, the prompt set gets re-run every month and the trend gets reported in plain English. Our guide to reporting AI visibility to your boss shows what that report looks like.
| Week | Focus | What you have at the end |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Baseline | Locked prompt set, scores by engine, AI traffic reports working |
| 2 | Source audit | The sites AI trusts for your questions, plus a fact-conflict list |
| 3 | Prioritize | Ranked roadmap and a "don't" list |
| 4 | First fixes | Technical, fact, content and outreach work done |
What 30 Days Can't Tell You
Be suspicious of anyone promising AI search results in a month, or a top ranking in ChatGPT. Three reasons:
- Citations churn constantly. Ahrefs tracked about 37,500 citations for 20 days. Between 64% and 76% of the pages cited on ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode changed from one day to the next.
- Some changes move on someone else’s schedule. What a model learned in training only changes when a new model comes out. Third-party lists update when their authors get around to it.
- How long it takes depends on where you start. An established site with clear gaps can see movement in its first re-runs. A new site with no third-party mentions is building from zero, the same as with SEO.
There’s a fair counterpoint too. Mark Williams-Cook, one of SEO’s best-known skeptics of this, calls AI prompt tracking “generally a big and expensive waste of time,” because models generate answers, not rankings. We agree with half of that. Daily position tracking is noise. A small, fixed set of real buyer questions, run several times and compared month to month, is the only way we’ve found to tell a client whether the work is moving anything.
How To Get Started With AEO: Baseline First
Write the questions your buyers ask. Run them everywhere, more than once. Find the sources AI trusts. Fix what’s wrong, in order, starting with what’s blocking everything else. Then re-run the same questions every month and judge the trend.
That’s how we build an AEO strategy. Most AEO strategies you’ll read are a checklist of ten tactics. This is different. It’s a measured starting point and a ranked list of what to change. If you’d rather have it built for you, AEO is what we do for B2B companies, e-commerce companies and local businesses, on top of the SEO that feeds it.
Frequently Asked Questions
An AEO strategy is a plan for getting your business named, described accurately and cited in AI answers. It starts with a baseline of what AI engines say about you today, finds the sources they rely on, and ranks the fixes by what’s costing you recommendations.
Write 25 to 30 buyer questions, run each one several times in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI features, and log who gets mentioned and cited. Then audit the cited sources, rank the fixes, and re-run the same questions every month.
No. Google says optimizing for its AI features is still SEO, and AI Overviews pull from its search index. AEO and SEO overlap. AEO adds measurement across AI platforms and off-site work like getting onto the lists and review sites AI cites.
It depends on where you start. A site that already ranks and is missing a few fixes can see movement in its first monthly re-runs. A new site with few third-party mentions takes much longer. Judge the trend across months, not one answer.
To measure AEO, compare the same prompt set month to month, by engine: how often you’re mentioned, cited and recommended. Back it up with Search Console’s generative AI report, GA4’s AI Assistant channel, and leads from AI traffic.
No. Google says you don’t need special AI text files to appear in its AI features. We leave it off every roadmap.
Schema markup (structured data that labels your page details) helps regular Google search results, so keep it clean. Google says no special schema is needed for its AI features, and we haven’t seen evidence it changes what ChatGPT says.
Want To Know What AI Says About You Before You Change Anything?
- How ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI describe your business today
- The sites they trust for your category, and whether you're on them
- A ranked 90-day plan to get recommended, with or without us
