Learn 80% of AEO in 19 Minutes

0:00Why is it that AI assistants recommend some brands but completely ignore [music] others? I'll tell you this, the difference between these two groups isn't luck. The group that's winning knows the techniques and follows a strategy. The same techniques and strategy [music] that I teach in our full 1 and 1/2 hour course on answer engine optimization or AEO. But here's the thing, you don't need to watch all of it to start getting results. So, I've extracted the 80% that matters most and packed it into this video where you'll learn the five pieces to AEO to start gaining visibility in AI search. By the end of this video, you'll

0:35have your own custom AI SEO strategy for your brand. And it all starts with understanding how AI search works. Now, most people assume AI assistants work like Google. You ask questions, you get answers from a list. But it doesn't work like that. [music] When you ask an AI assistant a question, that one prompt gets fanned out into dozens of smaller, more specific searches [music] behind

0:59the scenes. This is called query fan. For example, if someone asks, "Plan me a five-day [music] trip to Japan in November." The AI doesn't just search for that and send you some results like [music] a search engine might. Instead, it breaks that prompt down into things like, "Best neighborhoods to stay in Tokyo." "November weather in Kyoto." "Is

1:18[music] the Japan Rail Pass worth it?" And then it runs it all at the same time. Then it gathers information from multiple sources and synthesizes it into a response. And to give you an idea of how deep this research can go, it was reported that ChatGPT's deep research mode ran 420 searches for a single prompt about buying a red phone case. So, if your content only ranks for the main keyword someone might type into Google, you're [music] missing the majority of the queries AI is actually using to build its answer. To get cited, you need to be relevant across an entire topic, not just one or two keywords. But here's the

1:58good news. There are patterns in what AI sites more often. And based on H refs research, three things drive that probability. First is consensus, meaning the more places your brand shows up saying the same thing about you, the more likely AI is to believe and repeat it. Second is freshness. Content cited by AI is on average 25.7% [music] fresher than what ranks in traditional Google results, meaning AI actively [music] prefers recent content. And third is

2:29authority. 76% of AI overview citations come from pages already ranking in Google's top [music] 10, which supports that traditional SEO is the foundation of AI SEO. So, if you're already ranking well in Google, you have a massive head start. Now, understanding how the game works doesn't tell you how to get results. [music] So, the next piece of the puzzle is to understand where you stand compared to your competitors. And that's done through a brand gap analysis. This is when you measure where your brand should be showing up versus where it actually is showing up across Google, AI results, and the web in general. The easiest way to do this is

3:07an H refs brand radar. Just enter your domain, add a couple of competitors, and you'll get a high-level overview of how you stand compared to your competitors. Now, the real power comes in when you apply some filters, which will expose [music] the gaps in your brand analysis. For example, you can filter for responses that mention your brand but don't cite your website. These are your missed citation opportunities. You can add a [music] competitor and filter for queries where they're mentioned but you're not. That's a competitor gap. Or, you can look at specific topics to see whether AI associates them [music] with your brand or someone else's. That's a

3:43topic gap. Now, you can't fix everything at once, so take note of these gaps because they're going to be critical when we put together your custom AEO [music] strategy in a few minutes. But before we get there, you need to understand the full [music] picture. So the next thing we need to do is keyword

3:59and prompt research. People don't search AI assistants in keywords like they do with traditional search. [music] They use prompts. But here's the good news. A lot of what you already know from SEO is directly [music] applicable to AEO, especially with Google AI overviews. You still need seed keywords to build the foundation of your research, [music] and you need modifiers

4:20to turn those seeds into real searches. Now, the fastest way to come up with both is to ask your AI assistant of choice using this exact [music] prompt. "I'm doing keyword research for my type of site which makes money through this revenue model. My target audience are these people. Give me 10 seed keywords that are one to two words max and five plus modifiers that'll help me surface appropriate content formats that I can use in my keyword research. The seeds and modifiers should not share the same words." [music] After it's done generating, take those seeds into a keyword ideas report using your favorite keyword research tool. Mine's obviously

4:57Ahrefs Keywords Explorer. Set some modifiers and you'll get a complete [music] list of keywords to potentially target. Now, beyond the usual vetting tasks like understanding business potential, search intent, and keyword difficulty, there's one more filter that you need to run every keyword through. I call it the AI filter, and it lives [music] in there. When you Google a query, ask yourself, can AI fully satisfy the searcher with an AI overview? Because even if a keyword is great on paper, if Google's AI overview answers it so well that nobody needs to click through, that keyword might be a

5:34trap. And there's hard data behind this. AI overviews [music] appear on about 21% of all keywords, but nearly 58% of question queries trigger them. And get this, 99.9% of keywords that trigger AI overviews [music] are informational in intent. So, for those informational queries where AI is clearly going to eat the click, you don't ignore them. You got to target them differently. Instead of trying to rank and earn a click, your goal is to get your brand mentioned inside the [music] AI response itself. Now, to find those queries, head back to Brand Radar, hover over the AI platform you want to

6:12research, and click [music] others only. This shows you queries where competitors are getting mentioned, but you're not. Filter for best, top, versus, review, alternative, and you've got your short list of brand mention opportunities to go after. Okay, so now you know how the game works. You know where you stand, and you know which topics and prompts to target. Now, it's time to actually close those gaps, and much of that comes down

6:38to getting cited. Citations in AI search boils down to four things: your content, your mentions, your YouTube presence, and your technical setup. Let's talk about content on your own site first. So, I was digging through our research, and I found a few key data points that hint at how to create content that gets cited by AI. First is that content length doesn't matter. We analyzed 174,000 pages cited in AI overviews, and the correlation between word count and getting cited is basically zero. Over half of all cited pages are under 1,000 words. So, if you've been writing 3,000 word articles thinking longer is better, that doesn't apply here. On the other

7:19hand, freshness matters a lot. For ChatGPT specifically, 89.7% of its top cited pages were updated in 2025. And get this, 76% were refreshed within the last 30 days. So, if your content hasn't been touched in 6 months, you're already at a disadvantage. And third, format matters. 43.8% of all pages cited by ChatGPT are lists,

7:48best X, top X, comparisons and reviews. This is not some weird coincidence. These formats give AI structured and clear recommendations that it can pull from. Now, that's the macro approach to content creation. Keep your content focused, fresh, and use formats that AI can actually use. The micro approach on the other hand comes down to how you structure your content. And there are four principles [music] to follow. So, first is bluff, which stands for bottom line up front. This means that you should start every section with the answer, not the backstory. Both humans and AI weigh the beginning and end of a passage more heavily [music] than the

8:29middle. So, if your key point is buried three paragraphs in, both might miss it. Second is to create atomic content. [music] Basically, every section on your page should be able to stand on its own. And that's because AI chunks your content into pieces [music] when it processes it, and you can't control where the chunks fall. So, ideally, you want [music] every section to make sense out of context so the meaning survives no

8:53matter how AI pulls it. Third is entity rich writing. Instead of "This tool helps with SEO", write [music] "Ahrefs Keywords Explorer helps you find keywords with low difficulty and high traffic potential." The more specific entities and relationships in your writing, the more AI [music] actually has to work with to piece together relationships. And fourth, [music] keep

9:15your content simple and declarative. Write one idea per sentence in clear subject-verb-object structure. A good litmus test is that if a sentence takes two reads to understand, it's too complex and it [music] needs to be simplified. Now, great content on your own site is half the equation because here's the thing, a lot of AEO isn't about what's on your site, it's about getting mentioned on other people's pages. And this is where things get really [music] interesting. In a study of 75,000 brands, branded web mentions have the strongest correlation with visibility in AI overviews. That's stronger than backlinks, domain rating, referring domains, or anything else that we studied, which means [music] the

9:55single highest leverage thing you can do for AI visibility is get your brand named on other people's pages. And there are three tiers of pages to focus [music] on. Tier one are third-party editorial sites. This can be industry publications, review sites like The Wirecutter or TechRadar, and listicles and comparison posts on authoritative blogs. These are the hardest mentions to earn, but they're also the most valuable because they're exactly the kinds of pages that AI loves to cite. Tier two is user-generated content, and this can be in [music] community platforms like Reddit, Quora, or niche forums. Reddit is actually one of the most frequently cited sources by ChatGPT, and it's a

10:35foundational training source for large language models. So, find threads where people are asking questions that your product or expertise can genuinely answer, and contribute real answers. And don't just stop there. Go and join other communities where you can contribute regularly to. The idea isn't to game the system, it's to interact with your target audience. And tier three is your [music] own properties, like your YouTube channel, your podcast, your LinkedIn content. They're all indexed and accessible [music] to crawlers, so they can all potentially be sources AI pulls from. And remember, AI looks at consensus, so the more places your brand appears in a topically relevant way, the

11:13more training examples AI has to [music] learn from. Now, of those three tiers, there's one specific platform that deserves its own conversation because the data on this one is honestly kind of crazy, and that's YouTube. YouTube is the most cited domain in Google's AI overviews. And get this, YouTube mentions have a 0.737 correlation with ChatGPT visibility. That is the strongest correlation of any

11:41factor we studied. And there's a reason for that. GPT-4 was trained on over a million hours of YouTube transcripts. So, YouTube isn't just a platform that [music] AI sites, it's a platform AI has learned from, which means that if you want to dramatically increase your AI visibility, getting your brand mentioned on YouTube is one of the highest impact moves [music] you can make. And you can do this through sponsorships, outreach, or my favorite way, create YouTube search hits. You see, most people on YouTube target viral hits. And the videos usually start off strong with a big spike, [music] but once the YouTube algorithm has exhausted that interested audience, or

12:19if the video doesn't quite land like you'd hope it does, it dies, and it dies fast. A search hit, on the other hand, gets you consistent traffic from both Google and YouTube search, month after month, because people are actively searching for these evergreen topics. And those are exactly the videos AI is most likely to cite. To find topics that are proven search hits, you can look at the organic keywords report in Ahrefs Site Explorer with

12:45YouTube's [music] watch subfolder set. Filter for keywords ranking in the top three, and add terms related to your [music] niche. And now you have a list of potential search topics. Then just make the video and follow this exact video SEO optimization checklist. Put the keyword in the title and within the first couple lines of the description. Add timestamps for YouTube chapters, and actually [music] say the keyword in the video, because Google

13:08understands audio and pulls from it. Now, if you can retain the audience's attention, your video has a great chance of showing up every time for various search queries. Now, content mentions in YouTube cover most of what you'll spend time on in your AEO efforts, but there's something important we haven't covered yet [music] that's actually more about what not to do and that's to not accidentally block

13:33AI crawlers. According to our data, about 5.9% of 140 million websites are blocking GPTBot, which is OpenAI's crawler. That's millions of sites that are asking [music] ChatGPT not to view their pages. Now, in these people's defense, I'm guessing that most of them didn't do it on purpose. A lot of sites inherit robots.txt rules from old templates. In fact, if your site is on Cloudflare, you could be blocking AI crawlers without realizing it. And that's because they have a feature called instruct AI bot traffic with robots.txt that's now enabled by default. To check if your site is blocking AI crawlers, go to your domain.com/robots.txt and look for any disallow rules next to

14:15GPTBot, OAI search bot, ClaudeBot, or Google extended. If you see any, you're blocking that AI crawler from your site. All right, so now you've got the playbook: content, mentions, YouTube, [music] and technical. That's four pieces of the puzzle down. But none of this matters if you can't tell whether it's working. And that brings us to the next essential, which is to measure

14:36what's working. Now, I'm going to be up front with you. With traditional SEO, you've got Google Search Console giving you impressions, clicks, and rankings. With AI search, a lot of that data either doesn't exist or it's hidden from you. But you're not flying blind because there are three things you can track and together they give you a pretty clear picture of

14:55what's happening with your brand in AI. The first is AI referral traffic. This is when someone clicks through from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or any other AI platform and lands on your site. Now, it's important to know that there are nuances that come with tracking because not all AI platforms pass referral data properly. For example, ChatGPT's source links track properly, but in-content links on paid accounts don't. So, that means that whatever number you see in your analytics is almost certainly an undercount. So, it's useful for direction and as a relative metric, but not for precision. If you don't know how to set up this type of tracking in GA4,

15:31we have a video on that in our AEO course, so I'll link that up for you. Or, you can skip the install with GA4 [music] and install Ahrefs Web Analytics, which already has that and many other features built in and it's completely free. Now, the second thing to track is AI bot activity on your site. Instead of tracking the humans clicking through, we track the bots that visit your pages to read and index your content. And that's because if a citation bot keeps hitting a specific page, that page is likely being used as a source [music] in AI responses. The easiest way to track this is with a Cloudflare integration in

16:06Ahrefs Web Analytics, which works on Cloudflare's free plan. And the third thing to track is self-reported attribution. This one's probably the [music] least used method, but it might be the most important because a lot of the impact of AI visibility doesn't show up in your analytics at all. For example, if someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation, they might see our brand name and Google it afterwards, but analytics tools are going to attribute that conversion to organic. So, in my opinion, attribution is the most meaningful when it comes from the perspective of [music] the customer. So, add a simple question like, "How'd you hear about us?" to your sign-up flow, to

16:42your checkout, or as a post-purchase survey. Now, to put this into perspective at Ahrefs, AI search traffic was just 0.5% of our visits, but it drove 12.1% of our sign-ups. That's a 23 times higher conversion rate than organic search. And we would have never known that without self-reported attributions. Now, the brands winning in AI search,

17:05they aren't doing anything magical. They're treating SEO as the foundation, then they're layering AEO or AI SEO, whatever you want to call it, on top of it. They're adding content, mentions, YouTube, and the technical setup. That's it. But, this isn't a one-size-fits-all approach here. So, here's how you can turn this into your own customized AEO strategy. Start with the 30-second technical check we covered because if AI can't crawl your site, you're handicapping your content and your pages from being mentioned. Then, [music] set up your measurements from day one, either with HS web analytics or the AI

17:38traffic channel in GA4. [music] Also, implement the how did you hear about us question. I know it's small, [music] but it can be really, really valuable. Next, look at the biggest gap you noted from your brand gap analysis and match it to your priorities. For [music] example, if AI doesn't associate you with topics you should own, that's a content problem. Start by refreshing pages that used to rank but lost its ranking due to becoming outdated. This will be your fastest win. Or if competitors keep getting recommended by AI and you're not, then look at getting mentioned in listicles, reviews, [music] and Reddit threads where you aren't a

18:13part of that conversation. And if AI is citing content [music] formats you don't produce, like videos, you need to get on YouTube, whether that's creating your own content or getting in touch with creators that can amplify your brand. Now, the reason to do this now is that AI traffic has grown 9.7 times in the

18:32past year. [music] ChatGPT alone has grown 85% since January and now sends more traffic than Reddit or LinkedIn. But, most businesses haven't even started implementing AEO into their marketing strategy. So, it's worth getting started before [music] everyone else does to get a head start. And if you want the full playbook with every workflow, watch our complete AEO course [music] for beginners, which is

18:53right here on our channel.