Evidence over vibes
AI search visibility, GEO and AEO: what the engines actually do, what the data shows, and what to do about it.
Put the answer in the first paragraph, ask the question in the heading, and stop writing once one question is answered. That's most of it.
AI answers about you start from what's findable under your own name. A clean homepage, claimed profiles and healthy branded search are the base layer everything else sits on.
List every source an AI engine cites for your competitors but never for you. That list is your content and outreach plan — the GEO equivalent of a keyword gap analysis.
Mentions across credible sources correlate with AI visibility more strongly than backlinks do. Earn them with real data and expert quotes. Never buy them.
Say who you are in the same words everywhere, and make it checkable — on your own site and on the third-party sources an AI system also reads.
A clean robots.txt doesn't guarantee an AI bot can actually read your page. JavaScript-only rendering, a CDN's bot toggle and a firewall rule can each block access on their own.
AI engines can paraphrase what everyone already knows. They can't invent a number nobody has published yet — and that gap is where a small team's own research gets cited.
Update facts, dates, examples and sources on your best pages, and log every change. Freshness matters most for engines that retrieve live, like ChatGPT search and Perplexity.
Search bots and training bots are different jobs with different bot names. Allow what you want found, and decide training separately — one robots.txt rule doesn't control both.
One checklist across nine layers, strategy to measurement, with an honest evidence rating on every item — not a promise that the list is complete.
Keep your SEO foundations, add answer structure, then build third-party authority. The order matters more than which label you put on the work.
Schema markup makes a page's facts machine-readable. A controlled test found it doesn't move AI citations on its own, and Google says no special markup is needed for its AI features.
Before anything else, run pass-or-fail checks on crawler access and site structure. These 11 checks are the same ones behind ContextOwl's own report.
AI answers often lean on reviews, roundups, communities and listings as much as or more than a brand's own pages. Plan for the whole source ecosystem, not just your site.
Ten pass-or-fail checks, each with a clear bar to clear, that you can run by hand in an afternoon — no software required.