AEO Cheat Sheet
The AEO Cheat Sheet for Your Next Marketing Meeting
Love it or hate it, AI is here to stay. It's only a matter of time before a quarterly planning meeting ends with your client asking:
What's our plan for AEO?
When they do, you'll either execute a synchronised slow nod, buying a few seconds to look like you've thought about this before, or you'll give an answer that makes the client confident you can help, even if you haven't mastered it yourself.
Your clients are as intimidated by AEO as you are. Guiding them through it is the job. So here's the cheat sheet.
What is AEO?
Answer Engine Optimisation. When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini about your category, your product, or a problem your brand solves, AEO increases the chance your brand is understood and trusted enough to be cited by AI in the answer.
Your audience increasingly researches, compares and decides inside AI engines. Becoming visible there means making your website, content and strategy legible to AI.
Every platform has rules - Meta rewards video with a hook in the first three seconds and real people on screen. AI engines are no different. Learn the rules, then play.
What about search?
Search didn't die. It multiplied.
For two decades, search meant Google: One search box, one results page and a fight to be at the top of the list. (Yes, there are other pages. You've heard the joke about hiding a body on page two.)
Then social fractured it because people started asking TikTok for restaurant recommendations and YouTube for reviews. Search was splintering long before AI showed up. AI just does a better version of what Google did: rather than ranking pages and handing you a list, it organises the information it's been trained on and what it can find on the internet into one answer.
In this context, resenting AI is similar to resenting Google search and wanting humans to return to the yellow pages to find a plumber.
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All the platforms still matter:
Google - Still the largest search engine
TikTok - restaurants, products, recommendations
YouTube - how-to and reviews
Reddit - unfiltered opinion
AI Engines - funnel all of the above into one response
5 Things AI is looking for.
MONTHS 2-4
It ranks passages, not pages.
01
Google ranked your whole page. AI ranks your paragraphs and uses the two or three that answer the question best - so you're competing to be the most useful paragraph(s), not the longest page with repeated keywords.
MONTHS 2-4
Every paragraph has to stand alone.
02
If your answer only makes sense after three paragraphs of setup, it doesn't make sense at all to AI engines. AI wants the answer up front.
MONTHS 2-4
It's building an identity, not reading a page.
03
AI assembles a picture of your brand from everywhere you appear, not just your site. Contradict yourself across the web and it stops being sure who you are, and it doesn't recommend brands it isn't sure about. Each Ai engine pulls from different sources - it’s important to have a content strategy with AEO implemented across the board..
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MONTHS 2-4
Most of your citation surface belongs to other people.
04
Reddit threads, review sites, YouTube, trade press. These often get cited ahead of your own domain, because they read as independent, and therefore, trustworthy. AEO influences your entire content strategy.
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MONTHS 2-4
The boring stuff is cheap insurance.
05
Five first moves to start with.
Here are five things you suggest doing today that will always pay off.
Fix your entity data. Consistent name, category and facts everywhere you appear; site, social bios, Google My Business Profile.
02
Answer real questions in plain language on your own domain. In the first two sentences, three paragraphs and two anecdotes later. A portable car wash’s website pricing page might be headlined as, pricing. AI Engines want it to be: How much does a portable car wash cost?
Build a citation surface off your domain. Earned mentions, reviews, third-party coverage, community presence.
Get your structured data right. Schema. FAQ markup. Boring. Do it.
Start monitoring brand prompts now. Log what the engines say, monthly. You can't prove citation, sentiment and accuracy improvements without a baseline, and you can’t learn what AI already thinks of you without asking.
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If you’d like expert help getting started on monitoring brand prompts and completing AEO audits that supercharge your AEO strategy - Plus Narrative can help.
