Contributed to Content Marketing Institute, Recruiter.com, Startups.com, and dozens more publications 
- 1. AEO Best Practices
- 2. SEO vs. AEO
- 3. What Do We Do Moving Forward?
- 4. FAQs
Table of Contents
Getting cited and recommended by large language models. It’s so hot right now.
The big question we hear daily is “How do SEO best practices differ from AEO/GEO best practices?”
Here, we break down the biggest levers that affect AEO. We dive into the difference between AEO best practices and SEO best practices, and what all of this means for getting your business to show up in all information discovery sources in 2026 and beyond.
1. What are the AEO/GEO Best Practices?
LLMs and traditional search algorithms use similar principles to determine which websites to cite and recommend. Every AEO best practice focuses on answering at least one of these three questions:
- Relevancy: what does your business do, and what type of prompts are you a potential solution to recommend?
- Authority: what proof do LLMs have that you’re a credible recommendation?
- Crawlability: how easy is it for LLMs to find and analyze your brand?
No one knows all of the factors that influence LLM citations and recommendations. However, we do know six things we can do to get your brand cited and recommended far more often than your competitors:
- Deliberate and consistent positioning
- Educational content creation
- Expert commentary PR + influencing citation sources
- Technical SEO + UX
- On-page SEO
- Product feed hygiene
1. Deliberate and Consistent Positioning
The biggest change that AI brings to information discovery is the rise of long-tail information requests.
Users are no longer searching “best SEO agency”. They’re asking their preferred LLM something like this:
“I’m running an ecommerce business selling coffee that generated $5mm annual revenue with three full-time marketing employees. What’s a good SEO agency to work with that can help with content creation and SEO that doesn’t rely on AI tools to write content for their clients, but does handle the writing process?”
In the past, narrow positioning was a threat to search rankings. Search engines fail to provide relevant results for such specific queries, but LLMs excel at this.
The key to winning customers in the AI era is to define the perfect customer for your business and what makes your business different from your competitors. Then echo that positioning across every channel you can.
More on Positioning in the AI Era here.
2. Educational Content Creation
One of the cornerstones of trust for search engines and LLMs is topical authority, or the depth of your brand’s content about a specific subject.
Search engines look at topical authority to understand whether you’re a trusted source to speak to that subject matter.
A brand that writes twenty articles about building a successful ecommerce business, with each covering a different element of the subject matter, will have far more topical authority than a brand that writes one article about the subject.
How Educational Content Impacts LLM Visibility
Let’s say you’re planning a wedding and ask ChatGPT for bridesmaid dress recommendations.
The first source that ChatGPT cites is an article we created with our friends at Bella Bridesmaids.
Topical authority for the win again. Bella Bridesmaids has spent years investing in writing great content to help their followers. LLMs regularly cite them and recommend them when people are looking to buy bridesmaids’ dresses.
Using Educational Content to Influence LLM Responses
Creating informative content about your industry and your customers’ pain points gives you the opportunity to influence how LLMs frame their responses to particular prompts.
Bella Bridesmaids dictates this first part of the response about A-Line dresses.
If the Bellas didn’t sell A-Line dresses, they could advocate against A-Line dresses and recommend a different dress style instead.
Using Educational Content for LLM Product Understanding
Educational content creation can also educate LLMs on your products.
Writing an article about your manufacturing process, common customer questions, the sustainability of your packaging, and more, all become material for LLMs to reference to better understand your business.
If a customer asks Claude for pillow recommendations that will ship to Arizona within a week and use eco-friendly packaging, Claude will recommend pillow companies that clearly state their shipping options and packaging materials.
If you haven’t added this to your website, you’ll lose the sale to a competitor.
3. Expert Commentary PR + Influencing Citation Sources
The best way to expose your brand to LLMs is to earn backlinks and brand mentions across other websites.
We break this into two components:
- Earning brand mentions and links in industry-leading publications. This is the cross-section between link building and digital PR. There are dozens of ways to earn links and brand mentions. Our top recommendation in the AI Era is to focus on Expert Commentary PR.
- Influencing citation sources. Incorporating your brand in sources that are cited when LLMs look for information about you and your solutions. These could consist of review sites, forums like Reddit or Quora, and more.
One thing to keep in mind: many brands have gone all-in with spamming any sort of Reddit thread they can find. Short term, this can work. Long term, LLMs will course-correct and crack down on these types of practices (similar to how Google combats black-hat SEO with algorithm updates). We don’t recommend taking this approach.
4. Technical SEO + UX
The fourth core element of AEO lives at the intersection of technical SEO and user experience.
Structured Data (Schema Markup)
Schema markup is like training wheels for search engines and LLMs: it gives them more confidence that your website, social media, physical store, and other channels are all related to the same business.
The result is consolidating the credibility of each of these brand assets into one brand entity.
Let’s say you have a large, engaged YouTube following about coffee. Search engines see your YouTube channel as a great resource for coffee.
Use schema markup to help search engines see that your website and YouTube channel are part of the same brand, and you’ll see your website as a great resource for coffee as well.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics that provide a quantitative score for how fast your website loads and how easy it is to use.
Core Web Vitals will play an even greater role in AI as agentic commerce gains traction.
As Seer points out in a recent study, AI agents prioritize the websites that are easiest for them to use.
Discoverability, Crawlability, and Indexability
These are the three pillars of getting found and indexed by search engines. The same principles apply to LLMs:
- Discoverability: search engines and LLMs need to be able to find your website and brand online.
- Crawlability: search engines and LLMs need to be permitted to analyze (or crawl) your website.
- Indexability: search engines and LLMs need to be permitted to show your website in responses to users.
One caveat: traditional search engines follow strict policies that businesses set for them regarding crawlability and indexability (via robots.txt and meta robots). LLMs don’t always follow those same standards.
More on getting indexed in search engines here.
LLM.txt Files
LLMs.txt files were proposed in November 2024 as a tool to help LLMs better understand core information about your website.
It’s worth noting that, as of May 2026, we’ve seen no signs that these are regularly visited by LLMs.
And that’s why I see it as such a massive opportunity.
LLMs.txt files are a positioning exercise that forces you to describe your business in a publicly accessible document.
LLMs will eventually adopt this concept, and those who haven’t put this document together will scramble to create and publish theirs as soon as this happens.
Positioning is essential in the AI era.
Take your internal positioning document that describes your ideal customer, client testimonials, a summary of your business, etc., then take an hour to add this to a text file and upload it to your website.
5. On-Page SEO
Traditional on-page SEO strategies are invaluable in helping LLMs understand your website and brand.
AEO strategies fall right in line with on-page SEO best practices like:
- Easy-to-read URLs that include relevant keywords
- Proper heading structure
- Internal links
- External links
- Alternate text
- and more
Our guide to SEO foundations is a good place to start if you haven’t done any on-page SEO work on your website in the past.
6. Product Feed Hygiene
For ecommerce brands, product feeds are on the cusp of becoming 10x more valuable than ever.
For those wondering what product feeds are:
Product feeds are files that include information about all your products and their characteristics.
Most ecommerce-friendly CMSes will handle the heavy lifting for you in building and maintaining your product feeds after you integrate your website with various marketplaces (Google Merchant Center, Amazon, TikTok Shop, etc.).
LLMs also use product feeds to better understand your products and recommend them to users.
With that, when did you last audit your product feeds?
Review your product feed on all marketplaces where you sell and look for any:
- Inaccuracies
- Blank fields that you can manually populate
- Products that aren’t active due to a listing issue
From there, look for opportunities to expand product descriptions, provide clearer product titles, and upload high-resolution images to maximize visibility.
SEO vs. AEO: What are the Key Differences?
Brand Positioning Matters Less for SEO
Brands win in LLMs by defining a narrow positioning. Traditional SEO doesn’t reward narrow brand positioning as heavily.
Traditional SEO rewards brands that optimize their sites around themes their ideal customers search for online, and search behavior differs between traditional search engines and LLMs. Most people search Google/Bing for short phrases like “ecommerce SEO agency.”
As a result, optimizing content for these broader search themes still wins out over the narrower approach in traditional SEO.
Citations Matter Less for SEO (But They Do Still Matter)
SEOs typically refer to this as “unlinked brand mentions”. This is any mention of your brand name on the internet, without a link back to your website.
Google used to rely almost entirely on links as a credibility factor. Nowadays, Google is far more sophisticated.
I’d argue that having someone reference your company name in their article without a link back to your website has nearly the same impact as including a link back to your website, but there is still a difference.
More on the exception to the rule in this video:
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Educational Content Creation Is More Straightforward to Measure in SEO
Educational content is invaluable for visibility in both. Search engines and LLMs consider content written by and about your brand as a credibility factor when answering user questions.
If your pillow company offers free shipping, but LLMs can’t access that piece of information on your website, they won’t recommend you when a user asks for pillow companies that offer free shipping.
With SEO, the impact of content is more straightforward to measure. We can look at traffic coming to your site from specific blog articles. We can see keywords that the article ranks for. We can even see how many people made a purchase during the session that started with them reading a blog article.
LLMs often cite sources in their responses, but users are far less likely to click them.
Pew Research Center conducted a study in March 2025 on user behavior when AI Overviews appear in Google search engine results pages (SERPs).
They found that 1% of users clicked on one of the sources in the AI Overview (and another 8% clicked on a different source in search results). Put another way, AI Overviews being triggered meant that less than 10% of people clicked a link for more information.
A single blog article might be cited by LLMs and lead dozens of people to buy your product every month, but LLMs don’t make it easy to see that data point, and LLM rank tracking is extremely flawed.
What Do We Do Moving Forward?
SEOs and businesses that are reliant on SEO for customer acquisition need to broaden their focus.
The days of optimizing your website for just Google are over. We need to optimize our website for every information source our customers consult when learning about our industry.
There’s significant overlap between AEO and SEO best practices, but there are subtle differences to pay attention to.
For business owners and executives: my recommendation is to increase your SEO team’s budget and assign them the responsibility for AEO for your business. SEOs are experts at understanding how machines process information and how we can positively influence them.
For SEOs wondering where to go next: shift your mindset on your role and expertise. AEO isn’t a brand-new concept for you. AEO means doing SEO better.
Conclusion
If you’re looking to future-proof how customers find you online, contact us today.
We help B2C companies that treat their brand as an asset get more customers from SEO, content marketing, and Meta Ads.
SEO and AEO FAQs
What do all of these AI SEO acronyms mean?
Let’s do a quick rundown:
- AEO: Answer Engine Optimization
- GEO: Generative Engine Optimization
- LLM SEO: Large Language Model Search Engine Optimization
- LLMO: Large Language Model Optimization
- AIO: Artificial Intelligence Optimization
Most of these are used interchangeably to describe things your business can do to be recommended by/cited by LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude more regularly.
What’s the difference between AEO and GEO?
GEO and AEO are two different acronyms that marketers use to describe initiatives aimed at getting cited in AI-generated answers. There isn’t a universally accepted definition for these two, as of May 2026. As a result, you’ll see them used interchangeably, with some people arguing that GEO means X and AEO means Y.
Which LLMs are most popular today?
As of March 2026, here’s the breakdown of how many surveyed individuals in the U.S. use each AI platform at least once over the course of a month:
- ChatGPT: 34.8%
- Gemini: 16.06%
- Claude: 8.54%
- Deepseek: 2.42%
- Perplexity: 1.95%
- Microsoft Copilot: 1.64%
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