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The 5 Schema Types That Actually Move the Needle for AEO
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There are hundreds of schema types on schema.org. Most of them will never do a single thing for your AEO performance. A handful of them are the difference between getting cited in AI-generated answers and being invisible. I’ve been running AEO audits through the Sarah diagnostic system long enough to see the patterns clearly.…
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The 44% Rule: Why Your Intro Paragraph Is Your Most Valuable AEO Real Estate
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The 44% Rule states that 44.2% of all AI citations are pulled from the first 30% of an article — the introduction. This means your opening paragraph is the single highest-value piece of content on your entire page for AEO purposes. Here’s exactly how to write it to maximize AI citation rates. Here’s a…
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I Built an AI to Do AEO Audits. Here’s What She Keeps Finding.
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Over the last year I built an AI named “Sarah” Not because I wanted to be in the AI product business. Because I was doing AEO audits manually, and the most time-consuming part wasn’t the analysis — it was the systematic review of schema, content structure, and entity signals across dozens of pages. It…
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Zero-Click Is Not the Enemy — Here’s the AEO Strategy That Wins Anyway
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I’ve watched a lot of search industry panics over 27 years. The death of keywords. The death of SEO. The death of organic traffic. And now: the death of the click. 60% of searches end without a click. AI Overviews answer questions before users ever reach the results. ChatGPT synthesizes responses from a dozen…
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What an AEO Audit Actually Finds — A Real Client Deep Dive
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I get asked some version of this question in almost every conversation I have about AEO: ‘What do you actually find in the audit?’ It’s a fair question. AEO is abstract enough that even people who understand the concept aren’t sure what a diagnosis looks like in practice. So let me walk you through…
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Schema Markup for AEO: The Only Guide a Real Practitioner Wrote
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I’ve been implementing schema markup since before most of the people writing about it today entered the industry. And I’ll tell you something that the documentation at schema.org won’t: most of the schema types you can implement don’t move the AEO needle. A handful of them move it dramatically. This is the guide I…
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What Is AEO — And Why I’ve Been Doing It Since Before It Had a Name
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In 1997, I was optimizing pages for HotBot and AltaVista on a 14.4k dial-up connection. Nobody called it SEO yet. You just figured out how the engines thought, and you built pages that answered the question better than anyone else on the web. Fast forward to 2026, and we’re calling it AEO — Answer…