Category · 12 posts
AI visibility, answer engine optimization, LLM SEO — getting mentioned and recommended by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI search. Tool-shopper terms surging 700-1,900% YoY at KD 10-38.
Original tracking data from 74 commercial buyer queries run weekly against Perplexity and ChatGPT. Perplexity's top source is YouTube. ChatGPT's is Business Insider, then Reddit. Reddit is the only domain in both top three. And unknown niche sites regularly out-cite Forbes.
llms.txt is a proposed standard — a markdown file at your site root that hands AI engines a curated map of your content. Mine is live and auto-generated. Here's what the file actually is, the 15 minutes it takes to ship one, and the honest evidence on whether any AI engine reads it — which is thinner than the people selling you AEO packages admit.
I track AI citations for a living, and here's the uncomfortable finding: my expert blog holds 14 Perplexity citations and ZERO ChatGPT mentions — while my productized-services site gets cited by ChatGPT on 10 commercial queries. The difference is the playbook. Here's what ChatGPT actually cites (press, Reddit, and price pages), with the numbers to prove it.
llms.txt is a proposed standard — a markdown file at your site root that hands AI engines a curated map of your content. Mine is live and auto-generated. Here's what the file actually is, the 15 minutes it takes to ship one, and the honest evidence on whether any AI engine reads it — which is thinner than the people selling you AEO packages admit.
"ChatGPT SEO" is two completely different jobs wearing one name: using ChatGPT to do SEO work, and doing SEO so ChatGPT recommends you. Four times more people ask AI assistants about it than ask Google. I do both jobs for a living — here's what each one actually involves, which one your business needs, and the data on what ChatGPT really cites.
I track AI citations for a living, and here's the uncomfortable finding: my expert blog holds 14 Perplexity citations and ZERO ChatGPT mentions — while my productized-services site gets cited by ChatGPT on 10 commercial queries. The difference is the playbook. Here's what ChatGPT actually cites (press, Reddit, and price pages), with the numbers to prove it.
Original tracking data from 74 commercial buyer queries run weekly against Perplexity and ChatGPT. Perplexity's top source is YouTube. ChatGPT's is Business Insider, then Reddit. Reddit is the only domain in both top three. And unknown niche sites regularly out-cite Forbes.
I run my own AEO stack and got my site cited by name in Perplexity. Here's an honest breakdown of the AI SEO tool market — content generators, visibility monitors, and the suites — with real pricing and verdicts per use case.
LLM SEO is the practice of getting ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini to mention and recommend your business. Here's what actually drives it — brand mentions (r=0.664), entity signals, structured data — from someone whose site gets cited by name.
AI search doesn't rank pages — it extracts passages. Query fan-out, 134-167-word answer chunks, and why ChatGPT search runs on Bing. The mechanical guide to optimizing for AI Overviews, Perplexity, and ChatGPT, from someone who runs the stack himself.
Most 'AEO tools' are SEO tools with a new landing page. Here's the short list organized by job — monitoring, schema, content structure, indexing — including the free options and the parts I just built myself.
AI visibility is whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI mention your business when buyers ask for recommendations. 65% of consumers now research purchases with AI. Here's how the engines pick who to recommend — and how to become one of them.
Profound, Peec AI, Scrunch, Otterly, LLMrefs, plus the Semrush and Ahrefs bolt-ons — compared honestly by someone who built his own tracker instead. Prices run $29 to $2,000+/month, and none of them fix what they find.
AEO is how you become the source AI engines quote instead of the site they skip. This playbook comes from someone whose pages earn named Perplexity citations: answer blocks, entity consistency, schema, the Princeton GEO tactics, and the off-site work that predicts visibility 3x better than backlinks.
Three ways to track what AI engines say about your business: manual spot-checks (free, 1 hour/month), paid tools ($29-$499/month), or build your own checker on the Perplexity API for about a penny per query. I built mine — here's the full playbook.
AI Automation
4 posts
AI Design Tools
6 posts
AI for Business
69 posts
AI for Founders
3 posts
Business Growth
4 posts
Founder Sales
2 posts
Fractional CTO
9 posts
Fractional Product
1 posts
Go-to-Market Strategy
3 posts
Lean Software
2 posts
Pricing Strategy
2 posts
Product Leadership
6 posts
Vibe Code Rescue
48 posts
Book a free 15-min strategy call. Specific recommendation, no pitch.
Book a Call