When someone asks AI for a recommendation — are you in the answer?

What is AEO?

AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization — making your website and brand easier for AI systems to understand, trust, cite, and recommend. People increasingly skip ten blue links and ask an assistant: “who’s the best [your category] near me?” or “alternatives to [competitor].” If AI cannot describe you clearly, find trust signals, or cite a page, you are invisible in that conversation.

AEO work covers on-page clarity (what you do, who you serve), FAQ and comparison content, schema markup, citation-friendly structure, and — just as important — proof: whether AI actually names your firm and links to your site. That proof is what MarStack Signals collects.

AEO vs SEO

SEO and AEO work together. SEO helps search engines crawl and rank pages. AEO helps answer engines decide who to mention in a generated response. A high Google position does not guarantee ChatGPT or Perplexity will recommend you — and a strong AI mention can send demand even when you are not #1 in classic results.

• SEO asks: Can Google rank this page for a query?
• AEO asks: When someone asks an AI for advice, does it name you, cite your site, or send them to a competitor?
• SEO metrics: rankings, clicks, impressions, crawl health.
• AEO metrics: brand mentions, domain citations, share of AI answers, local / “near me” coverage, competitor gaps.

MarStack Signals — our AEO solution

MarStack Signals is the visibility layer for Answer Engine Optimization. It does not guess from your homepage alone. It asks the same kinds of questions your prospects ask — across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and related providers — and shows whether your brand shows up in the answer.

That is the difference between “we added FAQ schema” and “AI named us 12 times this month, cited our site on three prompts, and still recommends a competitor for Dallas.” Signals is built for that second conversation.

• Brand mentions — how often AI names your firm (and your competitors) in tracked answers.
• Source citations — which domains AI links to, and whether your website is one of them.
• Tracked prompts — the exact research questions Signals sends to AI systems, including category and local variants.
• Local / near-me coverage — service-area cities so you can see visibility for “near me” and metro questions, not only national topics.
• Competitor benchmarks — who AI recommends instead of you, topic by topic.
• Opportunities & deliverables — content briefs, citation targets, schema, and aliases, tracked as a managed work queue.
• Weekly visibility email — a local scorecard for your team: mentions, site citations, and week-over-week trend.
• Baselines & snapshots — before/after proof for monthly reviews and QBRs.

The managed AEO program

Signals is the measurement engine. The AEO Program is the monthly managed service around it — for firms that want someone to collect, interpret, and act, not only look at a dashboard.

• Onboarding — firm name, aliases, competitors, website domains, and service areas in Signals Settings.
• Baseline — an account-wide snapshot so later months have a before/after, not a vibe check.
• Collection — shared local prompts by city, plus market topics, so you see what AI says in the places you actually serve.
• Action — prioritized opportunities become deliverables: landing pages, local FAQs, citation targets, schema, name variants.
• Reporting — weekly email plus monthly visibility review (and QBR-ready sections for agencies).

Typical fit: a public website, a handful of named competitors, willingness to publish or update content monthly, and a need to prove AI visibility to leadership or clients.

Who AEO is for