The AEO action plan: a week-by-month checklist for AI visibility
The second half of a two-part guide to answer engine optimization lays out concrete steps. This week: verify Bing indexing through Bing Webmaster Tools, because ChatGPT cannot see brands Bing has not indexed; audit Reddit for brand mentions, recurring complaints and competitor-comparison threads; test visibility by asking ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google category and brand-versus questions; and fix the technical foundation, server-side rendering, sub-two-second page speed, schema markup, and a robots.txt that has not accidentally blocked AI crawlers. Sites with schema are two to four times more likely to appear in AI Overviews.
Within the month: freshen top content, since pages updated within 30 days earn 3.2 times more AI citations; publish comparison and honest-experience articles, which AI reads to learn category relationships; and build integration and how-to guides that make the brand citable for workflow questions.
By the end of March: cultivate authentic user content on Reddit, YouTube, Product Hunt and forums under a 90/10 helpful-to-promotional rule; get listed in review aggregators, which AI weights heavily; publish original survey data others cite; implement product, FAQ, organization and review schema; and add an llms.txt file. Content should open with a direct two-to-three-sentence answer, then detail, data and an FAQ, because AI retrieves direct answers first.
Elsewhere in seller news: a consultancy with a client base of 300-plus Amazon brands is recruiting senior brand managers with eight-figure private-label experience at $220,000 to $300,000 on-target earnings, with a $25,000 referral reward. A case study making the rounds describes a DTC furniture brand whose TV pilot, $15,000 a month across streaming and linear, looked unmeasurable until it was paused: site visits fell 22% in ten days and Google campaigns degraded, then recovered when TV resumed, making TV the brand's second-largest acquisition channel within six months. And Swapt has launched QR-code funnels for Amazon FBA sellers covering fraud-proof promotions, compliant review generation and policy-safe packaging inserts.
