FIELD NOTE 12 / AEO AND AI SEARCH
Find the question before polishing the page.
Spend your effort on content people have a reason to find and cite.
Before another AI-search checklist, ask which questions your site can answer with something specific and useful. Then establish a baseline and measure what changes.
What it looks like
Add FAQs, schema, and an llms.txt file everywhere. Expect citations.
Choose a real question. Check what answers already surface. Add evidence only your page can supply. Keep the page crawlable and clear. Measure each platform separately.
Put it to work
- 01
Check the demand and the evidence.
Choose a narrow topic where you have useful source material or direct experience. Inspect the questions people ask and the pages search surfaces. If you cannot find a plausible audience for the answer, reconsider the topic before expanding the page.
- 02
Make a useful page accessible.
Use a clear answer, inspectable sources, honest dates, and crawlable content. Google says its normal SEO requirements apply to AI features and that no special optimization is required. That does not guarantee inclusion or make presentation irrelevant.
- 03
Keep the measurement definitions intact.
Paul’s current headline combines 102K Bing AI citations and 84K Google generative AI impressions. These are different counters, not unique reach. The published Bing research and the skill’s frozen study corpus have their own dates and limits. Use separate platform baselines when judging a change.
Give this to your AI
Adapt the brackets to your task.Audit this page for [specific audience question]. First examine the demand and the evidence we can uniquely contribute. Read the current official search guidance. Separate indexing and usability fixes from hypotheses about citations. Record a baseline with platform, metric definition, date range, and source. Propose one measurable improvement and what would count as evidence against it. Do not promise rankings or citations.
A rise after a page change does not prove the change caused it. Search demand, platform behavior, and other updates may move at the same time. Keep claims about one site or platform within the evidence you actually have.
A useful answer comes first. Measure the rest.
Get Cited by AI ↗
A demand-first workflow with evidence-tagged rules and a public research ledger.
Inspect the project on GitHubSources & further reading
Personal counts are from Paul’s prompt-history analysis. Tool guidance was checked against these sources in September 2026. Confirm current behavior in your installed version.