The AEO playbook

What the 30-day plan actually does

Moving from a B to an A grade in AI visibility is four weeks of ordered work: measure a baseline across all five engines, rank the gaps by how much traffic-weighted query value they represent, fix the source pages the engines should be citing, tighten your schema and entity data, then re-measure against the same baseline. The score is a composite of five factors, and most B-grade brands are losing on two or three of them at once.

A grade means you show up early, get described accurately, and get cited when someone asks an AI engine about your category. B grade usually means one of those is broken: you appear but low, or you appear but described wrong, or you are named but never linked. The plan below assumes you already exist in the answers and the job is to raise how you appear, not to break in from zero.

Pondral scores visibility on a published five-factor rubric: Presence (20), Prominence (25), Context (20), Citation Link (20), and Competitive Presence (15). Knowing which factor is dragging your grade down is the whole point of week one, because the fix for a Prominence problem is nothing like the fix for a Citation Link problem.

Week 1: Baseline every engine, then triage

Do not touch a single page until you have a frozen snapshot. Run the same prompt set through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok, and capture three things per query: the verbatim answer, whether you were mentioned and where, and the exact citations the engine pulled. That snapshot is what you measure week four against. Change nothing before you have it.

The engines do not behave the same, so a single blended score hides your real problem. Perplexity and Gemini lean citation-heavy and will link out constantly, so a Citation Link gap shows up there first. ChatGPT and Claude synthesize more and cite less, so a Context or Prominence gap dominates. Grok skews to fresh and social signals. Read each engine's column separately.

Now triage. Rank gaps by traffic-weighted query value, not by how many gaps you have. One high-intent comparison query buyers actually type carries more weight than a dozen informational long-tails nobody converts on.

1. Build the prompt set from real buyer language: category queries ("best [category] for [use case]"), comparison queries ("[you] vs [competitor]"), and problem queries ("how do I fix [problem]"). Aim for 30 to 60 prompts.
2. Run every prompt through all five engines and log the verbatim response, your mention position, and the citation list for each.
3. Score each result against the five factors so you can see whether you are losing on Presence, Prominence, Context, Citation Link, or Competitive Presence.
4. Weight every gap by the query's commercial value and rank the list. The top five queries are your entire month of work.
5. Save the raw export. Same prompts, same engines, week four. No changes yet.

Week 2: Fix the source pages engines should cite

Take your top five ranked queries. For each one, name the single page on your site that should be the answer. Often that page does not exist, or it exists as a sales page that reads like a brochure. Engines cite pages that behave like references, not pages that behave like pitches.

The pattern that gets cited is boring and consistent. Open with a direct, self-contained answer to the query in the first 40 to 70 words, before any preamble, so an engine can lift it whole. Put the comparison in a real table or list, not buried in prose. State facts plainly with dates and numbers the model can quote. A page that answers the question in its first paragraph outperforms a page that warms up for three scrolls.

This is where you move Prominence and Context. When the source page directly answers the query, the engine ranks you higher in the response (Prominence) and describes you accurately instead of guessing (Context).

1. For each top query, create or rewrite one owned page whose sole job is to answer that query.
2. Lead with a 40-to-70-word extractable answer, then expand. No throat-clearing above it.
3. Convert any comparison into a scannable table or list. Models pull structure far more reliably than paragraphs.
4. Add explicit, checkable facts: prices, dates, specs, limits. Vague claims do not get quoted.
5. Link the page from somewhere crawlable and, if it is genuinely new, resubmit your sitemap so it gets indexed before you re-audit.

Week 2, continued: Schema that machines actually read

Schema does not raise your score by itself, but it removes the ambiguity that makes engines hedge or skip you. The goal is to let a machine parse what your page is, who published it, and what it claims without guessing from the layout.

Add the schema.org types that match the page. Article or the more specific type for editorial and guide content. FAQPage for pages built around question-and-answer blocks, where each Question maps to a real heading. Product with an Offer for anything sold. Organization on your site-wide markup with your legal name, logo, and sameAs links to your verified profiles. Validate every page in Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator, and fix anything that throws a warning, not just the errors.

1. Mark up editorial and guide pages with Article (or the closest specific subtype) including author, datePublished, and dateModified.
2. Use FAQPage only where the visible page really is questions and answers, with each Question tied to an on-page heading.
3. Add Product plus Offer to anything for sale so pricing and availability parse cleanly.
4. Put Organization on your global markup: legal name, logo, and sameAs pointing to your real external profiles.
5. Run both validators on every changed page and clear warnings as well as errors before moving on.

Week 3: Entity consistency and off-site reinforcement

Engines resolve you to an entity before they decide what to say. If your name, description, and category read differently across your site, your LinkedIn, your directory listings, and Wikidata, the engine either hedges or confuses you with a similarly named competitor. Pick one canonical name, one one-line description, and one category label, and make every surface match it exactly. This is the cheapest Context win most brands never do.

Then reinforce off-site, because models triangulate. A claim that appears only on your own domain is weaker than the same claim on three independent third-party sources. This is where you move Citation Link and Competitive Presence: the engine needs somewhere other than you to point when it names you.

Auditing your existing third-party mentions is the highest-leverage half-day here. Where engines are citing stale or wrong facts about you, the source page is almost always fixable by asking. Almost nobody does this, which is exactly why it works.

1. Write your canonical entity block (name, one-line description, category) and reconcile it across your site, social profiles, and every directory.
2. Create or update your Wikidata item, and seed or clean up Crunchbase, G2, and the two most-cited directories in your category.
3. Pull the citation list from your week-one audit and note every third-party page an engine used to describe you.
4. For any cited page carrying outdated or wrong facts, contact the owner with the correction and the source. Corrections to already-cited pages hit fastest.
5. Pitch one genuinely useful contribution (data, an interview, an expert answer) to the highest-authority site in your category. One placement on a trusted domain beats ten low-authority mentions.

Week 4: Re-measure against the frozen baseline

Re-run the exact prompt set from week one through all five engines. Compare gap by gap against the frozen snapshot, factor by factor, so you can attribute movement to the work you did rather than to engine noise. A cleanly executed source-page and entity pass usually closes a meaningful share of your top-priority gaps in a single cycle, though the exact number depends on how far behind you started and how competitive the category is.

For anything that did not move, read the verbatim response before you conclude the work failed. Non-closures almost always fall into a handful of causes, and each one has a different fix. Do not re-do the same page hoping for a different answer. Diagnose first.

1. Source page exists but reads like marketing, so nothing quotes it: rewrite the opening as a plain, extractable answer.
2. Entity still confused with a competitor: tighten name and description consistency and add the missing sameAs links.
3. You appear but low (Prominence): the query wants a comparison or a list and your page does not provide one in a liftable format.
4. You are named but never linked (Citation Link): you have no third-party corroboration, so push the off-site work from week three.
5. The prompt asks for something you genuinely do not offer: drop it from the target set instead of forcing a page.

Make it a monthly rhythm, not a project

AI visibility drifts because the engines change, competitors keep publishing, and your own facts go stale. A score you earned in April is not a score you still hold in July unless you re-measured. The brands that stay A-grade treat the four-week loop as a recurring cadence: a lighter monthly re-audit on the same prompt set, plus a full triage each quarter.

Between cycles, watch the two factors that move without you touching anything. Competitive Presence slides when a rival ships a better source page for a shared query. Citation Link erodes when a page that used to cite you gets rewritten or drops the reference. Both show up in a monthly re-audit long before they show up in your traffic.