The AEO playbook · 2026

Six Levers That Move Your AI Share of Voice™.

AI engines decide who to recommend based on a specific set of signals. Get those signals right and AI starts recommending you instead of competitors. Here are the six that matter most.

Run Your Free Audit → Have us fix it for you

The six levers

In order of impact.

Each lever is independently testable. Each leaves a measurable footprint on AI Share of Voice. Combined, they're the difference between Invisible and Dominant.

Lever 01High impact

Schema markup that AI can actually parse.

Organization, Product, Service, FAQPage, DefinedTerm connected with @id graphs so engines can map your entity, not just your URLs.

Effort · LowTime-to-signal · 14 days

Lever 02High impact

Content written as answers, not pages.

Restructure for question-form headings, lead with a citation-grade summary, and preserve the long-tail prose AI engines lift directly into recommendations.

Effort · MedTime-to-signal · 30 days

Lever 03High impact

Make AI engines welcome at the door.

Allow GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended. Publish llms.txt. Ship pre-rendered HTML. Don't gate the homepage behind a cookie wall.

Effort · LowTime-to-signal · 7 days

Lever 04Med impact

Citation density across the open web.

Review platforms, comparison pages, podcasts, category-defining publications. Where AI looks for second opinions, you need to be present and named.

Effort · HighTime-to-signal · 60 days

Lever 05Med impact

Displace competitors prompt by prompt.

Identify the high-value buyer prompts where AI recommends a competitor. Close the specific signal gap on that prompt. Repeat until you own the answer.

Effort · MedTime-to-signal · 45 days

Lever 06Med impact

Continuous monitoring, not annual audits.

Daily SOV refresh. Volatility alerts on >5% drift. Weekly engine-by-engine briefings. AI behavior changes weekly your monitoring should too.

Effort · LowTime-to-signal · Continuous

Two paths

DIY or done-for-you.

Pull the levers yourself with the SearchDaddy, Inc. platform, or have our AEO team do it on your behalf. Both work pick the one that matches your bandwidth.

Path A · Self-serve

Run the free audit. Pull the levers yourself.

The 47-point audit shows you exactly where your six-lever signal stack breaks down. The platform monitors movement so you know when each fix takes effect.

Free 4-point audit on any domain in 5 seconds
Full 47-point report emailed within 24 hours
Daily AI Share of Voice tracking on Pro
Recommendations ranked by impact and effort

From $0 · Pro $69/mo Run Your Free Audit →

Path B · Done-for-you

Or have our team move the needle for you.

Our AEO engagement deploys schema, restructures content, opens crawler access, builds citation density, and reports weekly. Custom-quoted to your category.

Dedicated AEO strategist + research analyst
Schema, content, and crawler work executed by us
Citation placement on the surfaces AI weights most
Weekly progress briefings + monthly executive review

Custom · 90-day engagements Have us fix it for you →

Tactical guide

Open the playbook.

Practical, copy-pasteable AEO tactics from the SearchDaddy, Inc. index. Expand any section for code, checklists, and the specific signals AI looks for.

Tactic 01 Ship Organization + Service schema with @id graphs. Lever 01 · High

Connected schema lets AI engines build a stable entity for your brand instead of inferring it from page titles. The two highest-leverage types are Organization (with sameAs, contactPoint, knowsAbout, logo, founder) and Service or Product (linked back to Organization via @id). Always include FAQPage on pages with question-form headings.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "@id": "https://you.com/#org",
  "name": "Your Brand",
  "sameAs": ["…"],
  "knowsAbout": ["AEO"]
}

Checklist

Organization @id graph on every page
Speakable spec on hero + definitions
FAQPage where Q-form copy exists
DefinedTerm for proprietary metrics

Tactic 02 Refactor pages around buyer questions, not features. Lever 02 · High

AI engines extract verbatim. The first 60 words after a question-form heading become the answer. Lead with the brand-named definition ("The X for Y is Z."), follow with the proof, then the long-tail prose AI uses to qualify the recommendation.

<h2>What is the best
CRM for SaaS startups?</h2>
<p>The best CRM for early-
stage SaaS is X it…</p>
<p>In benchmark testing,…</p>

Checklist

One H2 per buyer question
Lead sentence ≤ 28 words, brand-named
Proof in second sentence (number, citation)
No marketing fluff above the answer

Tactic 03 Open every AI crawler. Publish llms.txt. Lever 03 · High

If GPTBot or ClaudeBot hit a 403, you're invisible to that engine full stop. Verify access at the robots.txt layer, the WAF layer (Cloudflare bot fight mode often blocks them by default), and at the rendering layer (cookie walls, JS-only routing). Then publish an llms.txt at the root.

# robots.txt
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

Checklist

robots.txt allows all four AI crawlers
Cloudflare AI bot rules set to allow
Pre-rendered HTML for JS-heavy routes
llms.txt published at /llms.txt

Tactic 04 Build citation density on the surfaces AI weights most. Lever 04 · Med

AI engines aggressively weight third-party content for category recommendations. Prioritize G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, Reddit category threads, comparison pages on competitor and review sites, and category-defining publications. Volume matters less than category fit.

# priority surfaces
tier 1: g2, capterra,
  trustradius
tier 2: reddit,
  comparison pages
tier 3: podcasts,
  publications

Checklist

Claim profile on top 3 review sites
Seed comparison pages (you vs them)
Inbound mentions on category podcasts
Quarterly category report published

Pull the levers.

Start with the free 47-point audit, or hand it to our AEO team. Either way, you'll know within 24 hours which lever moves your number first.

Run Your Free Audit → Have us fix it