§ 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

§ 01 — 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

§ 02 — 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 →

§ 03 — 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

Two ways forward

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