Our AEO methodology: how we make you the answer AI recommends
What actually drives AI citations for B2B SaaS in 2026 — and why measuring the gap is the easy half. Our done-for-you method, and the things we'll never do.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is a simple goal with a hard execution: be the tool ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini name when a buyer asks for the best option in your category. This is the method we use to get there — including the counterintuitive parts we learned the hard way.
The uncomfortable truth: llms.txt won't save you
Every AEO checklist starts with llms.txt, and almost every one overstates it. In practice it is near-useless for citations today: large-scale crawler studies find it barely fetched, Google has publicly said it won't use it, and removing it has been shown to improve some citation-prediction models. We still ship a clean one — it's cheap hygiene and a forward bet — but if that's your whole AEO strategy, you will not get recommended.
What actually drives AI citations
The signals that move share-of-answer for a B2B SaaS are well understood. In rough order of leverage:
- Third-party review consensus — being present, with reviews, on G2, Capterra, TrustRadius (US) and B2B Stack, Reclame AQUI (Brazil). This is the closest thing to a citation multiplier, and most dev-adjacent tools under-invest in it.
- Comparison and "alternative-to-X" pages — answer-first, with a quotable feature table. Comparison content has the highest AI citation rate of any format.
- The Princeton content stack — citing sources, adding statistics, and using quotations each lift citations 30–40%; fluent, answer-first writing helps; keyword stuffing actively hurts.
- Original, first-party data — an annual study earns editorial coverage, which is what feeds Wikipedia and Knowledge Panels. It's an un-copyable, durable source of citations.
- Community presence — Reddit is the single most-cited domain in AI answers, and LinkedIn is a top B2B source. You can't fake your way in; you have to actually be there.
Measure, then execute — done for you
Diagnosis is the easy half. We run your brand through real, web-grounded answers from GPT-5.4 and Gemini, track a Reputation score, and map the exact citation gap against your competitors. Then — and this is the part most tools skip — our AI agents produce the fixes (comparison pages, structured data, entity claims, review playbooks, publisher outreach), a specialist reviews every change for brand safety, and we ship it to your site via your CMS or a GitHub PR, then re-verify against the live site. You approve; you never write a line.
What we will never do
We never fabricate reviews, testimonials, case studies, or citations. Earned inclusion only. Fake reviews violate G2/Capterra terms, the FTC's 2024 rule, and Brazil's CDC — and they backfire: platforms and the LLMs that read them detect and penalize astroturf. When we help you get reviews, they come from your real, verified customers, in their own words.