Beyond SEO: A Strategic Guide to Dominating AEO on ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini

The digital marketing world is on the brink of its most significant transformation since the advent of mobile search. The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's Gemini isn't just a new feature; it's a new paradigm (AI Overview on Answer Engine Results, AERs). Welcome to the era of AI Engine Optimization (AEO).

For years, we’ve mastered the art of ranking on a list of blue links. Now, the challenge is to become the definitive, trusted answer within a conversational AI response. Traditional SEO is the foundation, but AEO is the skyscraper we must now build.

As a case in point, we ran SEOSiri through HubSpot's AI Search Grader to see where we stand. The results are a perfect illustration of the new battleground:

Inspirational Hook: SEOSiri's AI Search Grade Comparison

Metric	Bangladesh (Blog Services)	United States (Website Services)	Key Insight
LLM Provider	OpenAI / Perplexity / Gemini	OpenAI / Perplexity / Gemini	Performance varies by geography and service type.
Overall AEO Score (Avg.)	45	48	A solid foundation, but clear room for dominance.
Highest Score	50 (Perplexity)	56 (Perplexity)	Perplexity, with its real-time data, currently favors our presence quality.
Lowest Score	40 (Gemini)	42 (Gemini)	Gemini integration with Google's core algorithm presents a unique optimization challenge.
Key Strength	Brand Sentiment (27-29/40)	Brand Sentiment (26-30/40)	The market perceives SEOSiri positively.
Opportunity Area	Brand Recognition & Share of Voice	Share of Voice & Market Score	We need to increase our visibility and mentions versus competitors.

(Data sourced from HubSpot AI Search Grader)

This report tells a story. While we're "on the right track," becoming the go-to answer for LLMs requires a deliberate, multi-faceted strategy. This guide will break down exactly how to move from "on the right track" to market leader by optimizing for the five core pillars of AEO.

Why AEO is the New, Non-Negotiable Frontier

Search is evolving from finding to knowing. Users don't just want a list of websites; they want a direct, synthesized answer. AI Engines provide this by scouring the web, identifying authoritative entities, understanding market sentiment, and piecing together a confident response.

If you are not optimized for AEO, you risk becoming invisible.

AEO is the practice of enhancing your digital presence to be more understandable, credible, and authoritative to AI algorithms. It's less about specific keywords and more about building an unimpeachable digital identity.

AI Search Grader Tools to Watch:

• HubSpot AI Search Grader: The tool used for our analysis, providing a great top-level view of the five pillars.

• SurferSEO: While primarily for SEO, its NLP and entity analysis features are crucial for AEO content.

• Clearscope: Excellent for ensuring your content covers a topic comprehensively, making it a better source for LLMs.

The Anatomy of an AEO-Ready Website

Before diving into the pillars, understand that some sites are inherently closer to AEO success. These are websites that have already invested heavily in modern SEO best practices.

Websites most likely to rank in AEO:

• Strong E-E-A-T: Sites that demonstrate deep Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Think detailed author bios, published research, and active industry participation.

• Robust Structured Data: Extensive use of Schema.org markup to explicitly tell search engines what your content is about (e.g., Organization, Service, Person, FAQ, How-to).

• Deep Topical Authority: Websites that own a niche with comprehensive, interconnected content clusters, not just scattered blog posts.

• Conversational Content: Content written in a natural, clear, and question-answering format.

• A Clean, Verifiable Digital Footprint: Consistent Name, Address, and Phone (NAP) information across the web, a well-maintained Google Business Profile, and a presence in trusted directories.

SEOSiri's own site, with its in-depth blog and clear service definitions, is a working example of a site built on these principles, providing a strong foundation for AEO.

How to Value Your AEO Position: A Relational Benchmark

Seeing scores like 46, 56, and 42 is one thing; understanding what they mean in the broader competitive landscape is another. While AEO is an emerging field without a single, formalized "international standard," we can use a maturity model to benchmark your position. This framework helps you understand where you are and where you need to go.

Think of your AEO position in four distinct stages:

Level	AEO Position	Typical Overall Score	Description
Level 1	Invisible	0 - 25	The AI has little to no awareness of your brand as a distinct entity. You are rarely, if ever, used as a source for answers. Your digital footprint is minimal or inconsistent.
Level 2	Foundational	25 - 55	The AI recognizes your brand but lacks sufficient trust signals. You might be mentioned occasionally but are not considered a primary authority. You are "on the right track," but there's significant room for optimization.
Level 3	Competitive	55 - 80	The AI views you as a credible and authoritative source within your niche. You are frequently included in consideration sets and used to form answers, but you still face stiff competition for the top spot.
Level 4	Dominant	80+	The AI considers your brand the definitive, go-to entity for your core topics. Your content and data are consistently prioritized as the primary source for generating answers. You are the benchmark others are measured against.

SEOSiri's Position Valuation:

Based on our HubSpot AI Search Grader report, SEOSiri currently operates firmly within the Level 2: Foundational stage. Our scores, ranging from the low 40s to the mid-50s, indicate that LLMs recognize our existence, and our positive Brand Sentiment gives us a solid base.

However, our lower scores in Brand Recognition and Share of Voice show that we are not yet considered a primary authority compared to larger, global competitors. Perplexity, which relies on real-time data, rates us higher, suggesting our current content quality is strong (Presence Quality). In contrast, Gemini and OpenAI, which rely more on historical authority, see us as less established.

Our goal—and yours—should be to strategically move from Foundational to Competitive, and ultimately, to Dominant. The following five pillars are the blueprint for that ascent.

The 5 Pillars of AEO Dominance: A Technical & Strategic Guide

Let's break down each metric from the report and outline actionable steps to conquer it.

1. Brand Recognition (Score: 2-6/20)

What it is: The degree to which an LLM can confidently identify your brand as a distinct and significant entity within its industry.

Why it matters for LLMs: AI needs to know who you are before it can trust what you say. It looks for a "critical mass" of mentions and context across the web.

How to Improve Your Brand Recognition Score:

1. Build a Knowledge Graph Presence:

   • Action: Secure a Google Knowledge Panel for your brand. This is the ultimate signal of entity recognition.

   • Guide: Start with a comprehensive Google Business Profile and a Wikipedia page (if notable enough). Use the Organization schema on your homepage, referencing your official social profiles and Wikipedia/Wikidata entries.

2. Execute a Digital PR Strategy:

   • Action: Earn high-authority, unlinked and linked brand mentions in industry publications, news sites, and podcasts.

   • Guide: Use services like HARO (Help a Reporter Out) to provide expert quotes. Publish original research or data studies that others will cite.

   • Example: When SEOSiri publishes a new case study on Bangladeshi market trends, it should be promoted to tech and business journalists in the region.

3. Systematic Directory and Profile Building:

   • Action: Ensure your brand is listed consistently on major business directories (Crunchbase, G2, Capterra) and industry-specific portals.

   • Guide: Your company name, description, and website should be identical across all platforms. This reinforces your entity identity.

2. Market Score (Score: 3-6/10)

What it is: An AI's assessment of your brand's position and influence within its specific market, relative to competitors.

Why it matters for LLMs: When asked, "Who is the best provider of X?", LLMs look for signals of market leadership.

How to Improve Your Market Score:

1. Target "Best of" and Comparison Keywords:

   • Action: Create high-quality content that directly compares your services to competitors or ranks providers in your industry.

   • Guide: Write articles like "Best SEO Agencies in the US vs. UK" or "SEOSiri vs. Competitor X: A Detailed Comparison." Get your clients to review you on third-party sites that publish these lists.

2. Acquire Backlinks from Market Leaders:

   • Action: Earn links from websites that LLMs already recognize as top-tier authorities in your industry.

   • Guide: Go beyond standard guest posting. Co-author a whitepaper with a complementary tech company or get featured in an industry leader's annual report. A link from HubSpot carries more AEO weight than a hundred links from unknown blogs.

3. Amplify Client Success Stories:

   • Action: Turn your case studies into a strategic asset.

   • Guide: Publish detailed case studies with verifiable data. Promote these case studies and encourage industry blogs to cite your results. For example, our SEO services at SEOSiri are backed by tangible results that can be showcased.

3. Presence Quality (Score: 6-12/20)

What it is: The quality of your primary digital asset—your website. It combines technical performance, user experience, and content structure.

Why it matters for LLMs: A high-quality, well-structured site is easier for AI to crawl, understand, and trust as a reliable source of information.

How to Improve Your Presence Quality Score:

1. Implement Comprehensive Schema Markup:

   • Action: Go beyond basic schema. Mark up everything you can: Service, FAQPage, Article, BreadcrumbList, Person (for authors), VideoObject, etc.

   • Guide: Use a tool like SchemaApp or Merkle's Schema Markup Generator to create nested, interconnected markup. Your Service schema should be linked to the relevant Article schema, which should be linked to the Person schema of the author.

2. Optimize for Core Web Vitals and Page Experience:

   • Action: Ensure your site is fast, mobile-friendly, and secure (HTTPS).

   • Guide: Aim for a "Good" score on all three Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS). A slow or clunky website is a negative trust signal for both users and AI crawlers.

3. Build Logical Topic Clusters:

   • Action: Structure your content around pillar pages and supporting cluster content.

   • Guide: A pillar page (e.g., "The Ultimate Guide to AEO") should be the most comprehensive resource on a topic. It should link out to more specific cluster posts (like this one!) and those posts should link back to the pillar. This signals topical expertise to AI.

4. Brand Sentiment (Score: 26-30/40)

What it is: The overall positive, negative, or neutral perception of your brand across the web. This was a key strength for SEOSiri.

Why it matters for LLMs: LLMs are designed to be helpful and safe, so they favor brands that the public perceives positively.

How to Maintain and Improve Your Brand Sentiment Score:

1. Proactive Review Management:

   • Action: Actively encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews on key platforms (Google, G2, Trustpilot) and respond professionally to all reviews, especially negative ones.

   • Guide: Create a simple email flow to request reviews after a successful project completion. Acknowledge and address the issues in negative reviews publicly to show accountability.

2. Social Listening and Engagement:

   • Action: Use tools like Brand24 or Awario to monitor mentions of your brand on social media and forums.

   • Guide: Engage in conversations where your brand is mentioned. Thank users for positive feedback and offer help where there are complaints. This turns passive mentions into positive sentiment signals.

3. Showcase Social Proof:

   • Action: Prominently display testimonials, client logos, and awards on your website.

   • Guide: Use a tool to embed dynamic reviews directly onto your service pages. This provides direct, positive sentiment signals for AI crawlers analyzing your site.

5. Share of Voice (SoV) (Score: 1-7/10)

What it is: The volume and frequency of mentions your brand receives online in relation to your direct competitors. This was a key opportunity area for SEOSiri.

Why it matters for LLMs: A brand that is consistently part of the conversation on a given topic is seen as more relevant and authoritative.

How to Improve Your Share of Voice Score:

1. Content-Led Competitor Disruption:

   • Action: Identify the key topics and SERPs your competitors dominate. Create content that is demonstrably better, more comprehensive, and more up-to-date.

   • Guide: Use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to find your competitors' top-performing content. Create a "10x" version that includes unique data, expert insights, or better visuals, then conduct targeted outreach for links.

2. Become an Industry Commentator:

   • Action: Consistently provide expert commentary on industry news and trends.

   • Guide: Be active on LinkedIn and X (Twitter), publish opinion pieces on your blog, and contribute to industry round-ups. This generates a steady stream of brand mentions associated with your expertise. For expert insights, you can always contact the team at SEOSiri.

3. Amplify Your Best Content:

   • Action: Don't just publish and pray. Invest in promoting your most valuable content.

   • Guide: Use a small paid social budget to boost your best-performing articles to a targeted audience. Repurpose a single blog post into a video, an infographic, a LinkedIn carousel, and a series of tweets to maximize its reach and potential for mentions.

Key Takeaways

• AEO is the New SEO: The goal is no longer just to rank, but to be the answer.

• It's About Entity, Not Just Keywords: LLMs think in terms of entities, relationships, and trust signals. Build your brand as an authoritative entity.

• The Five Pillars are Interconnected: Improving your Brand Recognition through PR will boost your Market Score. Better Presence Quality will encourage more positive Brand Sentiment.

• AEO is a Long-Term Strategy: These changes require a sustained, holistic effort across your marketing, PR, and web development teams.

• Start with a Strong SEO Foundation: Websites with excellent E-E-A-T and technical SEO are best positioned to win in the AEO era.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q1: What is the main difference between SEO and AEO?
A: SEO (Search Engine Optimization) primarily focuses on ranking a webpage in a list of search results based on keywords. AEO (AI Engine Optimization) focuses on making your brand and content the trusted, definitive source used by an AI to generate a direct answer to a user's query.

Q2: Which LLM should I focus on optimizing for?
A: All of them, but with a strategic focus. Google's Gemini is deeply integrated with its search index, making it critical. ChatGPT has massive user adoption, and Perplexity is a powerful real-time answer engine. A good AEO strategy will raise your visibility across all platforms because it’s based on universal principles of authority and trust.

Q3: How long does it take to see improvements in an AEO score?
A: It varies. Improvements in Presence Quality (technical fixes, schema) can be recognized relatively quickly. Building Brand Recognition, Market Score, and Share of Voice is a long-term effort that can take 6-18 months of consistent work in digital PR, content marketing, and reputation management.

Q4: Can a small business compete in AEO against large corporations?
A: Absolutely. AEO is not just about budget; it's about authority in a niche. A small business can achieve a high Market Score and Brand Recognition within its specific vertical by becoming the undisputed expert and building deep topical authority on its website.