[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 29 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.
Local Falcon
AI visibility scans across local markets.
Not yet reviewedVisit site
SEOmonitor
Keyword-based SEO and AI answer monitoring.
Not yet reviewedVisit site
Nightwatch
Search rankings and AI visibility in one workspace.
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 broader platform. ZipTie inspects answers beautifully; CiteCue starts lower, covers more engines across its tiers, 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 $29 single-engine Starter plan that grows into a remediation platform. Otterly wins raw coverage per dollar; CiteCue wins once prompt volume and action 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
Google Search's Generative AI Control: Audit Property Inheritance Before Changing It
Google's refreshed sharing-controls guide points publishers to Search Console's generative AI setting. Map parent and child properties before making a change that may reach beyond the page you are reviewing.
analysis
Google's Indexing API Quota Update: Check Eligibility Before Automating
Google refreshed its Indexing API quota documentation on 16 October. Teams running job or livestream pages should audit eligibility, queue capacity, and the meaning of a successful response before adding more submissions.
analysis
Google's UGC Fresh Data Program: Assess Platform Readiness Before Applying
Google has documented a dedicated ingestion program for qualifying UGC platforms. A useful application starts with evidence about authorship, access, moderation, and operational readiness.
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