Search is moving from ten blue links to a single AI answer. These are working notes on answer engine optimization (AEO) — how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini decide which brands to recommend, and how to become one of them.
We ran 10 buying questions through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok — 3 times each, 150 grounded answers — and counted every brand they named. Every category had a locked shortlist, well-known challengers flickered, and 11 real brands were never named once.
Across 150 grounded AI answers, we logged every source the engines cited. The pattern is clear: AI recommendations run downstream of review sites, listicles, and niche blogs — not your own homepage. Here are the domains that get cited most.
AEO is the practice of getting your brand recommended inside AI answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and other answer engines. Here's what it is, how it differs from SEO, and how to start.
SEO earns a ranking, AEO earns a citation, and GEO is another name for the same thing. Here's a plain-English breakdown of how the three overlap, where they diverge, and which to invest in.
A practical, step-by-step guide to getting ChatGPT to recommend and cite your brand — how it retrieves and chooses sources, the content that gets quoted, and how to measure whether it's working.
A candid comparison of AI search visibility and AEO tools — Profound, Athena HQ, Brand Radar, openllmrank, and the DIY spreadsheet approach — with the trade-offs on price, depth, and who each is for.