[01]
Guide
Running a 30-Day AEO Audit
A four-week sequence that establishes a baseline, finds the real bottleneck, and ships enough change to prove the channel is worth funding.
Answer Engine Optimization
Getting cited by AI is a discipline, not a rumour.
Guides, research and tool comparisons for the practice of making your content the source an AI assistant reaches for. Written for people with a prompt set, a backlog and a report due.
Start here
Why Your Brand Is Not Being Cited
Nine causes explain almost every citation failure: blocked crawlers, client-side-only rendering, bot mitigation, buried answers, duplicate coverage splitting your authority, thin corroboration, stale or wrong facts, an aggregator occupying your ground, and agent-hostile pages. Diagnose them in that order, because it is roughly the order of both likelihood and cheapness to fix.
Guides
All 10 guides[02]
Guide
Schema Markup for AI Search
Structured data was always about making meaning machine-readable. That mattered moderately for rich results. It matters more when the machine is composing an answer.
[03]
Guide
Technical AEO for AI Crawlers
The least glamorous part of AEO and reliably the highest-yield. If an AI crawler cannot fetch and read your page, nothing else you do matters.
[04]
Guide
llms.txt Explained: What It Does and What It Doesn't
A small file with a large amount of hype attached. Here is what it is for, which engines appear to use it, and why it is not a ranking lever.
The tool landscape
All 10 toolsEvery tool assessed against the same 23-point capability matrix. Where we could not verify a capability publicly we mark it undocumented rather than absent — see methodology.
CiteCue
Editor’s choice
Be the brand AI recommends.
Best for: Teams that want the diagnosis and the fix in one place, at a price a single marketer can sign off.
Ahrefs Brand Radar
Brand mentions across AI answers.
Not yet reviewedVisit site
Semrush AI Toolkit
AI visibility inside a full SEO suite.
Not yet reviewedVisit site
Evertune
Brand presence measurement across AI models.
Not yet reviewedVisit site
Head to head
All comparisons- Otterly.ai vs AthenaHQCheap breadth against revenue attribution. A ten-times price gap between two tools that barely overlap in intent.
- Profound vs Peec AIThe enterprise incumbent against the budget analytics tool — a $370 gap with surprisingly little between them in kind. Both report; neither acts.
- CiteCue vs ZipTie.devAn auditing instrument against a platform, at nearly the same price. ZipTie inspects answers beautifully; CiteCue covers more engines, more surface, and acts on findings.
- CiteCue vs AthenaHQRevenue attribution against automated remediation. AthenaHQ answers "what did AEO earn us"; CiteCue answers "what do we do about it" — and costs less at entry.
- CiteCue vs Otterly.aiSix engines for $29 against a platform that acts on what it finds. Otterly wins raw coverage-per-dollar; CiteCue wins once prompt counts and remediation enter the picture.
Research
All researchprotocol
Measuring AI Citation Rate: An Open Protocol
A replicable study design for measuring citation rate with defensible error bars. Published as a protocol so results can be compared rather than asserted.
synthesis
AEO Platform Pricing in 2026: What the Market Actually Charges
A synthesis of published pricing across ten AEO platforms, showing a 17x spread between entry tiers and a mid-market band where capability and price have decoupled.
News
All newsanalysis
Agent task testing remains the category's clearest capability gap
Across ten platforms we track, only one documents having an agent attempt real tasks on a site and report where it fails.
analysis
Self-serve AEO pricing has clustered into three bands
A 17x spread between entry tiers, and a mid-market band where price has stopped predicting capability.
analysis
llms.txt adoption by major engines remains unconfirmed
Vendor marketing increasingly treats llms.txt as a ranking factor. No major engine provider has publicly confirmed using it as a retrieval input.
Submit an article for review
We publish practitioner writing, corrections and data — including findings that contradict ours. Original, sourced and specific beats long.