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AI search and AEO

AI assistants now answer a share of the questions that used to start on a search results page, and the advice about how to appear in those answers has run well ahead of the evidence. This category sticks to what can be checked: what Google documents, what the crawler logs show, which sources assistants actually cite for local questions, and why the same query gives you a different answer every time you run it. After reading it you should be able to tell a real AEO recommendation from a repackaged SEO one, and measure your own visibility without deceiving yourself.

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All twenty articles on AI search and AEO

In reading order rather than by date. 20 published so far, and the rest are written and scheduled. Titles without a link are not live yet.

  1. llms.txt: what a 137,000 site study found

    An llms.txt file does nothing for AI search visibility. Ahrefs checked roughly 137,000 sites and found 97% of published llms.txt files were never fetched by anything at all.

  2. What Google's own documentation says about optimizing for AI

    Google says optimizing for its AI features is optimizing for search. Its published guidance lists no extra technical requirements, no required schema, and no special files.

  3. Measuring AI visibility without fooling yourself

    You cannot measure AI visibility with a single number. These systems are non-deterministic, so the same prompt returns different answers to different people at different moments.

  4. Which sources AI assistants actually cite for local queries

    There is no verified public ranking of which sources AI assistants cite for local queries, and anyone handing you one is estimating.

  5. Reviews as an input to AI answers

    Reviews reach AI answers two ways. They move the local rankings that AI features retrieve from, and their text is the most distinctive writing about your business anywhere on the web.

  6. Unstructured citations and why niche local blogs matter

    An unstructured citation is a mention of your business in ordinary prose, in a news piece, a blog post or a forum thread, with no directory formatting and often no link.

  7. Structured data for AI: what is required and what is not

    Structured data is not required for AI features. Google states there is no special schema.org markup needed for its generative results, and that a page needs only to be indexed and.

  8. AI crawler user agents and what your server logs reveal

    Your server logs are the only fully deterministic AI measurement available to you.

  9. Should you block AI crawlers

    For most local businesses, no. Blocking removes you from systems your customers are already using, and it protects almost nothing, because your hours, address, services and reviews.

  10. AI Overviews and what happened to your click-through rate

    Nobody can tell you what AI Overviews did to your click-through rate. The published estimates disagree with each other, use incompatible methods, and mostly come from companies selling.

  11. Getting into AI answers when you have no brand recognition

    You get in by being the best answer to a narrow question, not by competing for the broad one.

  12. Non-determinism: why your AI ranking changes every time you check

    Your AI ranking changes every time you check because these systems are non-deterministic.

  13. AI visibility tools compared honestly

    Most AI visibility tools do one of four things: sample prompts and count mentions, monitor brand mentions across the web, track AI Overview presence in search results, or read your.

  14. Query fan-out and what it means for your content

    Query fan-out means the system takes one question, breaks it into several related searches, runs them, and assembles an answer from the combined results.

  15. Entity consistency across the web

    Entity consistency means every source that describes your business describes the same business.

  16. When AEO is just SEO with a new name

    Most of the time. Google says optimizing for its generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.

  17. What AI search means for a business with no website

    You are not invisible. Google states that a Business Profile helps your services appear in both AI responses and other Google Search results, and most of what an assistant says about a.

  18. Tracking referral traffic from AI assistants

    You can track some of it, and you will undercount badly. Assistant referrals appear in analytics only when the visit carries a referrer, and many do not.

  19. AI search and local intent: what is different

    Local questions must resolve to a real place, so the answer is constrained by facts that either check out or do not: address, hours, categories, reviews, distance.

  20. What to tell a client who asks about AI search

    Tell them the truth, which is short. AI answers are built on search results, so the work that gets them into AI answers is mostly the work already being done.

Be honest with yourself

When this category is not your problem

If your ordinary search visibility is weak, AI visibility is the wrong thing to work on. Assistants largely cite sources that already rank, so the fix is upstream and this category will not shorten the path.

And if you are being sold a monthly AEO retainer before anyone has measured your current citation rate, the measurement is the missing piece, not the retainer.

Where to go next

If someone has quoted you for AI search work, send the proposal to eric@seod.com and I will tell you which parts are real, which are ordinary SEO renamed, and which cannot be measured at all. No charge, and I will say so if the proposal is a good one.

AI visibility does not sit in a separate box from search. Search visibility covers AEO and GEO alongside the profile and on-page work around it.

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