AEO strategy
A strategist's job is deciding what not to build.
Most answer engine work sold as strategy is a content calendar with a new label. Strategy is the part that happens before the calendar: which engines matter for your buyer, which of your pages can realistically be cited, and which of them you should stop publishing.
35pp
Handbook
free, no email gate
10+
Platform breakdowns
engine by engine
273
Posts published
every claim sourced
The search, honestly
Why this query returns so little
There is very little written for people buying strategy rather than execution. The results skew to service pages selling delivery, and to tool vendors describing their dashboard. The gap is anything that helps a marketing lead decide where the effort should go in the first place.
- Service pages selling execution, not decisions
- Tool vendors describing tracking rather than strategy
- Almost nothing on allocating effort across engines
- No honest treatment of which platforms are not worth the work yet
The case
Not every engine deserves your effort
ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, Grok and Meta AI retrieve differently and reward different things. Some are not worth optimising for at all yet, and there is published work here saying exactly which and why, including the ones I think are a waste of time today.
Citations are not recommendations
Being cited and being recommended are different outcomes, and most measurement conflates them. A strategy that optimises for citation count can leave you quoted constantly and never suggested. Knowing which you are buying is the first strategic decision.
The thinking is free before it is paid
The AEO handbook on this site is a free download with no email gate, and the blog is two hundred and seventy-three posts deep. Read those and you will know whether the judgement is worth hiring before you have spoken to me.
Questions
What is the difference between a strategist and a consultant here?
A consultant answers the question you asked. A strategist tells you when it is the wrong question, which usually means arguing that a channel you are invested in is not worth the effort. If you want execution capacity, hire delivery instead; it is cheaper and better at it.
Do you do the implementation too?
Some of it. Structure, schema and the content decisions, yes. Large-scale production and engineering work belongs with your team or a delivery partner, and pretending otherwise is how strategy engagements quietly become understaffed content shops.
How is this measured?
Against a baseline captured before anything changes: citation share by engine, what the assistants currently say about you, and the queries you appear in. Without that baseline every later number is unfalsifiable.
Is AEO just a rebrand of SEO?
Google's own guidance says it is the same discipline applied to a new surface, and that is mostly right. The part that is genuinely new is that the answer can satisfy the user without a click, which changes what a page is for. Anyone selling AEO as an unrelated discipline is selling a label.
Start with the audit.
What your branded search looks like today, what the assistants currently say about you, and whether there is enough upside to be worth paying for. Yours either way.