Get cited inside the answer — not just ranked on the page below it.
AEO is how brands get pulled directly into ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews as the source the model trusts. We engineer the schema, entities, and passages that earn those citations.
Ranking #1 doesn't matter when the model never quotes you.
AI search isn't a SERP — it's a synthesis. The brands that get cited are the ones whose entity graph, schema, and passages are easiest for a retriever to trust in milliseconds. Most enterprise sites fail on at least three of the five signals that decide that decision.
- Competitors get named in answers — you don't
Even when you outrank them on Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity recommend the brand whose passage is cleanest, not whose backlinks are strongest.
- Schema is incomplete or contradictory
Missing FAQPage, HowTo, Article, and broken sameAs on Organization is the single most common reason LLM crawlers ignore a domain. We see it on 7 of 10 enterprise audits.
- Content can't be chunked for retrieval
Walls of text without H2s, bolded definitions, or canonical answer blocks make your page un-quotable, no matter how authoritative the domain.
- Zero off-site citation footprint
LLMs lean on G2, Wikipedia, podcast transcripts, and category directories. Without that ambient mention graph, even a perfect page gets passed over.
Ranking #1 means very little when the answer panel cites three competitors above you.
Answer engines don't reward the page with the most backlinks. They reward the page with the cleanest passage, the clearest entity graph, and the schema a retriever can parse in milliseconds. Most sites fail on all three — and never see why their organic traffic is leaking into AI Overviews.
You rank, but you're not the cited source
Google AI Overviews and Perplexity quote the source whose passage best matches the query — usually a 60–90 word block with explicit entities. If yours is buried, you lose the click before the SERP loads.
Schema is incomplete or wrong
Missing FAQPage, HowTo, Article, and sameAs on Organization is the single most common reason LLM crawlers ignore a domain. We see this on 7 out of 10 enterprise sites we audit.
Content isn't structured for retrieval
Answer engines retrieve passages, not pages. Walls of text without H2s, bolded definitions, or canonical answer blocks make your page un-quotable.
Zero off-site citation footprint
LLMs lean on third-party signals — G2, Wikipedia, industry directories, podcast transcripts. Without that ambient mention graph, even a perfect page gets passed over.
A 60-day stand-up, then a continuous quote-rate program.
- 01
Retrievability audit
Week 1–2We pull your top 200 commercial queries through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews and log every cited URL, anchor, and competitor. The output is a quote-rate baseline we report on weekly.
- 02
Entity & schema rebuild
Week 2–4Organization, Person, Product, FAQPage, HowTo, and Article schema are rewritten from a single canonical source. sameAs is wired to Wikidata, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, and category-specific authorities.
- 03
Passage-level rewrites
Week 3–6Each priority page gets a 60–90 word answer block immediately after the H1, plus structured definitions, comparison tables, and bolded entities — formatted exactly the way retrievers chunk content.
- 04
Off-site citation seeding
Week 4–8We earn placements on the third-party sources LLMs disproportionately trust — Wikipedia drafts, industry datasets, expert roundups, podcast appearances with full transcripts.
- 05
Continuous quote-rate ops
Month 3+Monthly re-prompting across all four engines, regression alerts when a citation is lost, and quarterly entity refresh. AEO is not a one-time fix — answer surfaces shift weekly.
AdWave AEO Framework
Six interlocking layers that compound. Skip one and the others under-deliver.
Entity Resolution
Define a single canonical entity for your brand, products, locations, and people — wired to Wikidata, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, and category authorities.
Schema Architecture
Organization, Person, Product, FAQPage, HowTo, and Article schema rebuilt from a single source of truth, validated continuously.
Passage Engineering
60–90 word answer blocks engineered for retrieval — placed where chunkers actually look, with bolded entities and structured definitions.
Citation Network
Earned placements on the third-party sources LLMs disproportionately weight: industry datasets, expert roundups, podcast transcripts.
Quote-Rate Monitoring
Weekly re-prompting across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Overviews. Regression alerts the moment a citation is lost.
GEO Reinforcement
Generative engine signals fed back into the entity graph and citation network so each engine reinforces the others.
What ships in a 60-day AEO engagement.
Top 200 commercial prompts scored across all four major answer engines.
Canonical entity definitions wired to authoritative external IDs.
Full structured data deployment with continuous validation.
30–60 priority pages restructured for retrieval-friendly chunking.
Earned placements on the sources LLMs trust most in your category.
Looker Studio dashboard with weekly quote-rate and SoV reporting.
Slack/email notifications the moment a tracked citation drops.
Entity, schema, and passage updates as answer surfaces evolve.
Monthly senior-strategist sessions tied to your pipeline KPIs.
What a 90-day AEO program actually looks like.
Median trajectory across our last 24 engagements — citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Overviews.
Median AEO outcomes from our last 24 engagements.
These are not aspirational figures. They're pulled from the prompt-tracking dashboards we run for clients across SaaS, professional services, and e-commerce. The biggest delta usually shows up between week 6 and week 10, once schema, passages, and off-site citations start reinforcing each other.
Quote-rate funnel: of 1,000 commercial prompts, ~640 trigger an answer engine, ~280 cite at least one source per query, and only the top ~70 sources earn a click-through to the brand.
AEO vs. traditional SEO — what actually changes.
AEO doesn't replace SEO. It changes which signals matter most, and adds new ones SEO never had to think about.
AEO pays back fastest for these three buyer profiles.
VP Marketing or Head of SEO at a Series B–D SaaS
Triggered when organic CTR drops 15%+ year-over-year despite stable rankings, and the team can see AI Overviews stealing the click.
We rebuild the schema layer, restructure the top 40 commercial pages for retrieval, and stand up weekly LLM share-of-voice reporting in Looker Studio.
Director of Growth at a multi-location healthcare or services brand
Triggered when ChatGPT and Perplexity are recommending competitors by name in patient and prospect prompts.
We focus on entity authority, doctor and clinician profiles, location-level FAQPage schema, and earned citations on category-defining publications.
Marketing Partner at a professional services firm
Triggered when prospects start saying 'ChatGPT recommended you' — or worse, recommended a competitor.
We build expert-author entity graphs, seed authoritative third-party citations, and engineer practice-area pages around the exact passages LLMs prefer to quote.
From 0 ChatGPT citations to 47% branded prompt SoV in 90 days.
A 180-person workflow SaaS was ranking page-one on every commercial keyword but losing 22% of organic CTR to AI Overviews. We rebuilt their entity graph, deployed end-to-end schema across 1,400 URLs, restructured the top 42 commercial pages with retrieval-friendly passages, and seeded 18 earned citations on G2, two podcast transcripts, and a Wikipedia draft. By day 90, they were the most-cited vendor in their category across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.
AEO looks different in every category. Here's where it pays back fastest.
B2B SaaS
Ranking #1 but losing CTR to AI Overviews citing competitors.
Become the default vendor named in commercial-intent prompts.
See playbookHealthcare & Med Spa
ChatGPT recommends competitors by name to local patients.
Doctor and clinician entity authority that dominates conversational search.
See playbookLaw Firms
Prospects say 'ChatGPT recommended a competitor'.
Practice-area entity graphs that earn AI citations on signed-case queries.
See playbookEcommerce
Product comparison prompts cite Amazon and competitors instead of your PDP.
Schema and passage work that earns brand mentions in shopping research.
Home Services
Local Map Pack rankings don't translate to AI assistant recommendations.
Service-area entity authority that wins voice + AI assistant queries.
See playbookProfessional Services
Niche expertise invisible to LLMs that default to generic 'best of' lists.
Expert-author entity graphs and earned citations on category-defining publications.
AEO isn't right for every brand — yet.
- Brands ranking page-one on commercial keywords but losing CTR to AI surfaces
- Series B–D SaaS with measurable organic pipeline contribution
- Multi-location healthcare, legal, and professional services brands
- Ecommerce categories where comparison prompts drive purchase decisions
- Companies with the editorial discipline to maintain entity & schema accuracy
- Brands with no organic traffic baseline or analytics tracking
- Sites with content fully gated behind login
- Teams looking for a one-time fix instead of a continuous program
- Brands not willing to publish public expert-author content
We were doing AEO before there was a name for it.
Most agencies are still re-skinning their SEO retainers. We've been engineering for retrieval since GPT-3.5.
We re-prompt every tracked query weekly across all four major answer engines — most agencies test once and call it a baseline.
We start with the entity graph, not the keyword list. Schema and passages flow from a single canonical source of truth.
We've placed earned citations on the sources LLMs disproportionately trust in 14 industries — and we know which ones move which engines.
Quote-rate, share-of-voice, and citation regression alerts your CMO can read without a translator.
The tooling we run quietly in the background.
LLM prompt tracking & citation monitoring
AI search analytics & SoV reporting
Enterprise schema deployment & validation
Canonical entity resolution & sameAs wiring
Backlink & citation network analysis
Executive AEO dashboards
Server-side conversion attribution
Automated prompt regression testing
Educational reading we send to every new client.
The retrieval, ranking, and synthesis layers behind every LLM answer.
Why the entity graph is now the most important asset in organic search.
The third-party sources that disproportionately influence each engine.
Becoming the brand ChatGPT recommends by name in commercial prompts.
Earning placement when Google synthesizes the answer above the SERP.
How entity-first content design compounds across both classic and AI search.
Everything decision-makers ask in scoping calls.
Real questions from VP Marketing, Head of SEO, and CMO discovery — clustered by what they actually care about.
AEO compounds when paired with these.
Optimize across the full generative answer surface, not just one engine.
ExploreBe the brand ChatGPT recommends by name in commercial prompts.
ExploreContinuous SoV monitoring across every major LLM.
ExploreCluster systems that strengthen entity authority for AI retrieval.
ExploreCrawl, index, and schema foundation that AEO depends on.
ExploreEarned placements on the sources LLMs disproportionately trust.
ExploreSee exactly which prompts cite you — and which cite your competitors.
We'll run your top 50 commercial queries through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, then send back a quote-rate report with the specific schema, entity, and passage gaps blocking citations. Turnaround is 5 business days.
- 5-day turnaround
- No commitment
- Senior strategist call