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What an AEO Audit Actually Finds — A Real Client Deep Dive
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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The 40-Word Rule: How AI Decides What to Quote (And What to Ignore)
There’s a rule of thumb I’ve started including in every AEO audit I deliver, and it’s the one that tends to produce the fastest results when clients act on it: the 40-Word Rule. The underlying data: AI extraction systems pull answers under 40 words at more than twice the rate they extract longer passages.…
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Schema Markup for AEO: The Only Guide a Real Practitioner Wrote
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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The Retrieval Gap: Why 73% of Brands Get Zero Citations from ChatGPT
There’s a term I’ve started using with clients that gets a visible reaction every time: the Retrieval Gap. It’s the distance between where your brand lives on the web and where AI systems go looking for answers. And for most businesses — even ones with solid SEO, good rankings, and plenty of content —…
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What Is AEO — And Why I’ve Been Doing It Since Before It Had a Name
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…
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AEO vs. SEO vs. GEO — The Honest Breakdown Nobody’s Giving You
Every few years, a new acronym lands in digital marketing and the vendor ecosystem pounces on it. Some are real shifts. Some are rebranded versions of things we already do. And some are genuine new disciplines that get buried under so much buzzword noise that even experienced practitioners struggle to separate what’s real from…