Guides

Guides to getting cited by AI

How to show up when ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude answer — the principles behind answer-engine and generative-engine optimization, measured honestly.

• AEO vs SEO: The Real Difference, and Why They're One SurfaceSEO and AEO aren't rivals and you don't pick one. SEO tells you what people want and whether you rank; AEO tells you whether the AI actually cites you.
• Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): What It Is, and What Actually Gets You CitedAEO is about winning the citation, not the rank. The formatting advice everyone repeats — schema, FAQs, 40-word answers — is necessary but no longer sets you apart.
• Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): What It Is, and What Actually Moves ItGEO is getting your brand into the answers generative engines write — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, AI Overviews.
• Keyword Density vs Placement: The Case for Prominence Over DensityStop counting how many times a keyword appears and start checking where it appears. Keyword density was never a real ranking factor — placement is.
• Are AI Visibility Metrics Accurate? Why You Need Grounded MetricsMost AI visibility tools hand you a confident number. The question is whether that number traces to anything real.
• Does llms.txt Work? What the Evidence Actually ShowsFor getting cited in AI search, no — the evidence says llms.txt does nothing measurable. It has one real use, in the agentic / developer-tooling layer.
• Google AI Overviews: How They Work and How to Appear in ThemGoogle AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries above the search results that draw heavily on conventional organic strength — which is why AEO and SEO can't be run as separate programs.
• AI Share of Voice: The Per-Engine Metric Everyone Sells as One NumberAI share of voice is the proportion of AI answers in a category where your brand appears versus competitors — measured per engine over a dated prompt set. The aggregate number is the comfortable lie.
• AI Visibility: Why It's a Matrix, Not a ScoreAI visibility is how present and accurately represented a brand is across AI engines — and it's never a single number. It's a per-engine, mention-vs-citation matrix.
• What Is an Answer Engine? The Category Behind the Zero-Click ShiftAn answer engine responds to a query with a synthesized answer instead of a list of links — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Google's AI Overviews. It collapses the funnel to zero clicks.
• The Citation Gap: When AI Mentions You but Won't Cite YouThe citation gap is the distance between how often an AI engine mentions a brand and how often it cites the brand's own content. It's a precise diagnosis of what to fix.
• Entity Authority: Who You Are vs. What You KnowEntity authority is how consistently a brand is recognized as a thing across the web — and in the LLM era it overtakes topical authority as the dominant trust signal for citation.
• LLM Citation: What Makes an AI Engine Cite a SourceAn LLM citation is when an AI engine attributes a claim to a specific source. It's distinct from a mention — and the strongest reported predictor of it is entity authority, not backlinks.
• Prompt Visibility: Measuring Brand Presence at the Prompt, Not the KeywordPrompt visibility measures whether your brand appears when someone asks a specific question, on a specific engine, this week. Honest tracking needs a versioned prompt set and dated, per-engine results.
• Query Fan-out: Why You Get Cited for Questions You Never TargetedQuery fan-out is when an AI engine silently expands one question into several sub-queries and synthesizes one answer. Optimizing for it means covering the problem space, not the head term.
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Why AEO Works the Way It DoesRAG is the pipeline most answer engines use: retrieve relevant passages, then generate an answer grounded in them. It's why citation is won at the retrieval and extraction stage — not by backlinks.