kingvegeta
Regular Member
- Dec 9, 2018
- 385
- 147
Founder here, launched an AI avatar tool earlier this year. Category is basically owned by two companies everyone knows, both with years of authority and backlink profiles I couldn't match in a decade. I spent about 7 years doing SEO/marketing agency work before this so I knew exactly how dead that road was for a new domain.
So we skipped it. Posting this because the AEO advice I keep seeing here is mostly "publish 100 blog posts optimized for AI" which is exactly what didn't work for anyone I know, and is usually posted by someone selling content packages lol.
The thing that changed everything for us was realizing AI assistants don't actually care about your website. Like at all. When someone asks ChatGPT for the best tool in a category, it's not reading your homepage. It builds the answer from third party stuff it already trusts. Listicles, review sites, youtube, news, reddit threads like this one honestly. If your brand isn't mentioned in those sources you simply don't exist to the model. Your site could be perfect and it wouldn't matter.
My rough math after months of doing this: 80% of the game is off your website. The remaining 20% is boring on-site stuff like making sure the AI crawlers can even access your pages (check your cloudflare settings, seriously, ours was blocking bots for weeks before we noticed).
What we actually did, roughly in order:
We pulled citation data and mapped which sources each platform keeps using. They're all different and this surprised me. AI overviews pull a ton from youtube. ChatGPT and copilot basically eat whatever Bing feeds them, so Bing matters way more than anyone gives it credit for. Perplexity really likes "best X tools" listicles on random third party domains.
Then we just... went to those sources. Found the exact articles that kept showing up in answers for our keywords and got ourselves added where we could.
Where we couldn't get in, we wrote our own articles and put them on free publishing platforms. The big ones that accept contributors and already have domain trust. Paid nothing. Some of those became cited sources within weeks.
Also did tutorials on third party sites and some tutorial videos on youtube. Tutorials are underrated btw, they sit right next to all the "how to make X" questions people ask AI.
Our own site stayed almost empty this entire time. No blog. Handful of pages. That's the part I still find funny.
Something I didn't expect: nobody actually clicks through from a ChatGPT answer. What happens instead is the AI names your brand, then the person googles your brand name, reads reviews, checks pricing, and buys. You can watch branded searches grow in search console as the citations spread. That was the moment I stopped doubting the whole thing.
Other thing I didn't expect, it snowballs by itself after a point. People writing listicles research them by asking AI, we're in the answers, so we end up in their listicles without asking anyone. And since everyone drafts articles with chatgpt now, AI written articles just... include us. Each one becomes another source. I assume this is why the incumbents never have to do anything and still get cited everywhere.
Where we're at: 650+ paying customers, roughly 1 in 3 said they found us through an AI assistant. It's our biggest channel now, ahead of google and socials.
Full disclosure since someone will ask, yes it's my product, and yes I've started doing this for other companies too because the agency muscle memory never dies. Not linking anything. Happy to answer questions, this stuff is genuinely fun to talk about.
So we skipped it. Posting this because the AEO advice I keep seeing here is mostly "publish 100 blog posts optimized for AI" which is exactly what didn't work for anyone I know, and is usually posted by someone selling content packages lol.
The thing that changed everything for us was realizing AI assistants don't actually care about your website. Like at all. When someone asks ChatGPT for the best tool in a category, it's not reading your homepage. It builds the answer from third party stuff it already trusts. Listicles, review sites, youtube, news, reddit threads like this one honestly. If your brand isn't mentioned in those sources you simply don't exist to the model. Your site could be perfect and it wouldn't matter.
My rough math after months of doing this: 80% of the game is off your website. The remaining 20% is boring on-site stuff like making sure the AI crawlers can even access your pages (check your cloudflare settings, seriously, ours was blocking bots for weeks before we noticed).
What we actually did, roughly in order:
We pulled citation data and mapped which sources each platform keeps using. They're all different and this surprised me. AI overviews pull a ton from youtube. ChatGPT and copilot basically eat whatever Bing feeds them, so Bing matters way more than anyone gives it credit for. Perplexity really likes "best X tools" listicles on random third party domains.
Then we just... went to those sources. Found the exact articles that kept showing up in answers for our keywords and got ourselves added where we could.
Where we couldn't get in, we wrote our own articles and put them on free publishing platforms. The big ones that accept contributors and already have domain trust. Paid nothing. Some of those became cited sources within weeks.
Also did tutorials on third party sites and some tutorial videos on youtube. Tutorials are underrated btw, they sit right next to all the "how to make X" questions people ask AI.
Our own site stayed almost empty this entire time. No blog. Handful of pages. That's the part I still find funny.
Something I didn't expect: nobody actually clicks through from a ChatGPT answer. What happens instead is the AI names your brand, then the person googles your brand name, reads reviews, checks pricing, and buys. You can watch branded searches grow in search console as the citations spread. That was the moment I stopped doubting the whole thing.
Other thing I didn't expect, it snowballs by itself after a point. People writing listicles research them by asking AI, we're in the answers, so we end up in their listicles without asking anyone. And since everyone drafts articles with chatgpt now, AI written articles just... include us. Each one becomes another source. I assume this is why the incumbents never have to do anything and still get cited everywhere.
Where we're at: 650+ paying customers, roughly 1 in 3 said they found us through an AI assistant. It's our biggest channel now, ahead of google and socials.
Full disclosure since someone will ask, yes it's my product, and yes I've started doing this for other companies too because the agency muscle memory never dies. Not linking anything. Happy to answer questions, this stuff is genuinely fun to talk about.
