The AEO field guide

Get quoted by the answer.

How AI search decides who gets recommended, and what to do about it. Plain-English guides, written to get quoted.

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GuideJul 2, 2026

ChatGPT started linking to brands. Most teams haven't noticed.

In May ChatGPT quietly began placing clickable brand links inside its answers, and referral traffic jumped overnight. Here is what changed, and how to be on the right side of it.

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PlaybookJul 2, 2026

Reddit is quietly deciding whether AI recommends you

Community threads have become one of the most-cited sources in AI answers, and most brands have no presence there at all. Here is why it happened and what to do about it, carefully.

Read the guide7 min read
GuideJul 2, 2026

AI sends you 50 visits. Google sends 5,000. Watch the 50.

AI referral traffic looks like a rounding error in every dashboard, and it converts almost like paid search. The size of the line is hiding what the line is worth.

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GuideJun 18, 2026

What AEO actually is, and why SEO alone won't save you

Answer Engine Optimisation is not a rebrand of SEO. It is a different surface, a different ranking, and a different unit of traffic. Here is how to think about it.

Read the guide9 min read
PlaybookJun 11, 2026

The prompts every brand should be tracking

You cannot improve an answer you never read. These are the prompt patterns that decide whether a model recommends you, with a way to build your own list.

Read the guide8 min read
TechnicalJun 4, 2026

FAQPage schema that AI actually quotes

Structured data is one of the few levers you fully control. Done right, it hands a model a ready-made answer. Here is the shape that gets pulled.

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GuideMay 28, 2026

How to get recommended by ChatGPT

ChatGPT names two or three brands and moves on. Getting into that shortlist is not luck. It comes down to a handful of things you can actually influence.

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PlaybookMay 21, 2026

Why your brand isn't showing up in AI answers

If a model never names you, it is rarely random. It usually comes down to four fixable reasons, and each has a different fix. Here is how to find yours.

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TechnicalMay 14, 2026

llms.txt and what AI crawlers actually read

A file called llms.txt promises to hand AI a clean map of your site. Here is what it does, what it does not, and what actually moves answers today.

Read the guide8 min read

What the engines recommend

Which AI note-takers do ChatGPT and Perplexity recommend?24 answers read, 56 tools named, measured 29 July 2026.Named most oftenFireflies.ai

AEO is its own discipline, not a coat of paint on SEO.

Three things change the moment a model answers instead of a page of ten. The guides above go deep on each.

Mentions, not clicks

In answer engines the unit of visibility is being named in the reply, not a blue link a buyer clicks.

Per answer, not per keyword

The same brand can be the obvious pick for one prompt and absent from the next. You rank a sentence at a time.

Sources are leverage

Models lean on third-party pages, so being cited elsewhere moves answers in ways on-page SEO never could.

Reading about it is step zero.

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