AEO consulting that leaves your team able to run it

What does AEO consulting include?

It includes the plan, the measurement setup and the training, but not the bulk of the writing or development. We decide with you which buyer questions matter, find out who AI answers cite for them today, and turn the gaps into a ranked roadmap your team can own.

The engagement is built around working sessions rather than a slide deck. Your marketing lead, a writer and whoever manages the website join, because the decisions touch all three roles. Between sessions we review drafts, check robots.txt changes and answer questions in a shared channel.

• A prompt set of real buyer questions, grouped by funnel stage and product line.
• A value-versus-effort matrix covering content, technical and entity fixes.
• An answer-first page template with question headings, a short answer block and an FAQ section.
• A developer checklist for crawler tokens, Cloudflare AI crawler settings and server-rendered HTML.
• Review of the first pages your team rewrites, with line-level edits.

When is AEO consulting a better fit than a done-for-you program?

Consulting fits when you have people who can write and ship pages but lack a method. If nobody in-house has time to rewrite pages or chase third-party mentions, our ongoing AI search optimization program is usually the better choice.

A one-off AEO audit sits on the other side. It diagnoses problems but does not stay with you while you fix them. Consulting picks up where an audit ends: it turns findings into an AEO strategy, assigns owners, and checks the work as it lands. Many clients start with consulting, run the playbook for a few months, and only bring us back for quarterly reviews.

How do we build an AEO strategy your team can actually run?

We start from the questions buyers ask and work back to the pages that should answer them. Each prompt in the set is tagged with the page that should be cited, the competitor currently cited, and the reason we think that source won.

Google's AI features documentation explains that AI Overviews and AI Mode may use query fan-out, running several related searches across subtopics before showing supporting links. So a strategy built only around head terms misses the follow-up questions that engines quietly ask on a buyer's behalf. We map those subtopics too, which often reveals that a comparison page, a pricing explainer or an integrations page will do more than another blog post.

Finally, we rank everything on a simple value-versus-effort grid. High-value, low-effort fixes such as unblocking OAI-SearchBot or adding a clear answer to an existing page go first. Large projects like original research go on the roadmap with a date and an owner.

Why can't you reuse your SEO keyword list for AI answers?

Because the pages AI assistants cite are often not the pages that rank. Ahrefs found that only 12% of URLs cited by AI assistants rank in Google's top 10 for the original prompt.

Your keyword list is still useful as a starting point, and Google itself says optimizing for generative AI search is still SEO. But prompts are longer and more specific than keywords, and the cited source is frequently a third-party page such as a G2 profile, a Reddit thread or a LinkedIn article. An AEO consultant has to plan for those sources as well as your own site, or the strategy covers only half of what the engines read.

What will your writers and developers learn?

Writers learn to put a plain answer in the first two sentences of every section; developers learn which crawlers to allow and how to prove it in server logs. Both habits outlast the engagement.

For writers we cover question-led H2s, short answer blocks, named sources in the sentence, original data, comparison tables and visible last-updated dates. Google's guide notes there is no need to chop content into tiny pieces, so we teach clarity rather than fragmentation. For developers we cover the difference between OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot, PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User, Claude-SearchBot and ClaudeBot, plus Organization schema with sameAs links that matches what the page shows.

How do we measure whether the strategy is working?

We set a baseline before anything changes and rerun the same prompt set monthly. That way your team sees citation share move, or not move, against a fixed reference.

We also connect first-party sources: Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance for Copilot citations and citation share, Search Console's generative AI performance report, and a GA4 channel group for chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com and gemini.google.com referrals. Seer Interactive reported that brands cited in an AI Overview earned 35% more organic clicks than those left out, which is why we track citations and clicks together rather than treating them as separate goals.