Your AEO Strategy + Action Plan Checklist | 4.2. AEO Course by Ahrefs

Hey, it's Samo and welcome to the final lesson in Href's AI search course. Now, throughout this course, we've covered everything from how AI search works to how to find the right keywords and prompts to creating and optimizing content, how you can earn mentions, and even how to set up your analytics for AEO. But there are three questions I haven't answered yet that are super critical to know. Is AEO actually worth it? How do you know if you're making progress? and what should you actually be doing on a regular basis to keep growing? So, that's what this lesson is about. Let's get into it. So, let's start with a big question. Is AEO actually worth your time? Now, I'll be honest. If you look at raw traffic numbers, AI search is still relatively small. According to our data, AI referral traffic accounts for about 0.25% of a site's total traffic on average. And Google still sends about 210 times more traffic than the top AI platforms combined. So if you're looking at this purely from a traffic standpoint, you might think it's not worth it. But here's where the story gets interesting. At Hrefs, our AI visitors convert at 23 times the rate of organic search visitors. And we're not alone. Versel is seeing 10% conversion rates from AI traffic. Tally says AI is their largest acquisition channel. It helped boost their ARR by a million dollars. Think about that for a second. The traffic volume is small, but the quality of traffic is significantly higher. And the reason for that is simple. When AI recommends you, it's already explained to the user why you're a good fit. So, the traffic arrives prequalified. They're not browsing. They're ready to act. And on top of conversion quality, AI traffic is growing fast. It's grown about 9.7 times since last year. Chat GPT alone has grown 85% since January, it now sends more traffic than Reddit or LinkedIn. So, while the numbers are still relatively small today, the trajectory, it's pretty clear. AI traffic is only going to grow from here. But here's what I think a lot of people miss about AEO. The real value isn't just the clickable traffic. It's the brand awareness that happens inside the AI conversation. Every time AI recommends your product or mentions your brand, that's an impression you never had before. And most of those impressions never result in a click to your site. They result in someone googling your brand name later or engaging with your brand on social media when they see it in their feed because they recognize it. So, the way I think about it is this. AEO isn't an alternative to SEO. It's a new layer on top of it. And the brands that build that layer now, while it's still early, are going to have a massive advantage as AI search continues to grow. Now, the main downside, which we talked about in the last lesson, is that it's not perfectly measurable. But just because you can't measure something precisely, it doesn't mean it's not working. It's kind of like brand marketing. You can't track every billboard to a sale, but you know it shapes how people think about you. AEO is the same way. So, how do you know if you're making progress? Well, if you followed along in module 2, you set up your brand radar baseline and did your first brand gap analysis. Now, it's time to go back and check how things have changed. Pull up your brand radar dashboard and look at four key things. First, AI share of voice. How have you moved relative to your competitors? If your share has grown, your efforts are working. If it stayed flat while a competitor has grown, you need to dig into why. At Hrefs, we're tracking queries and prompts at scale. So, brand radar, it gives you a really good look at the overall trend. Second, look at cited domains. Are new domains citing you that weren't before? This tells you if your mention earning efforts from module 3 are paying off. Third, topic coverage. Have you closed the gaps you identified? Are there new topics where you're showing up where you weren't before? And fourth, mention sentiment. Is AI saying accurate and positive things about your brand? This is especially important because AI doesn't just repeat what you put on your site. It synthesizes information from everywhere. I'd recommend doing this as a quick monthly check and do a deeper competitive audit quarterly. Now, while we're on the topic of what AI says about you, there's something important that you need to be aware of. AI is vulnerable to misinformation. And I don't mean it in a theoretical way. We actually tested it. We created a completely fake luxury brand, planted three contradicting sources about it across a blog, Reddit, and Medium, and then asked eight different AI platforms about the brand. The results were pretty alarming. After the fake sources were planted, Gemini and Perplexity repeated the misinformation in 37 to 39% of their answers. They cited fake founders, fake cities, fake pricing stories, all presented as verified facts. Now, the good news is that Chat GPT was much more robust. It stayed under 7% and cited the brand's official FAQ in 84% of its answers. But the point is that not all AI platforms are equally resistant to bad information. So, what does this mean for you? It means you need to fill every information gap about your brand with specific and official content. Create an FAQ that directly addresses common questions. Use specific numbers and dates and facts, not just vague claims. Because when AI has to choose between vague truth and specific fiction, it tends to choose the specific fiction. Also, monitor what AI is saying about you regularly. If you spot inaccurate information, the fastest fix is to publish content on your own site that directly contradicts it and then work on getting the third-party source corrected. All right, so let's bring this all together with your AEO action plan. If you're wondering what to do first, here's what I'd focus on this week. Check your robots.txt for AI bot access. This takes about 5 minutes max, and it's the most common technical blocker. Make sure AI can crawl your site. Next, set up your AI analytics. Create the AI traffic channel in G4 or set up HRS web analytics. Add a how did you hear about us question to your signup or checkout flow. Start measuring from day one so you can see how you progress over time. Next, update your most important pages for freshness. Remember, AI content is 25.7% fresher than what ranks in traditional search. Pick your top five to 10 pages and make meaningful updates, new stats, updated examples, current information. Next up, run your brand gap analysis. Set up brand radar if you haven't already, and go through the process we covered in module two. Know where you stand before you start optimizing. And finally, identify your top 10 mention earning targets. Use the cited domains and pages reports in content explorer to find the pages where getting a mention would have the biggest impact on your AI visibility. And then on an ongoing basis, do a monthly brand radar check to track your progress in a quarterly competitive audit to catch bigger shifts and just rinse and repeat. Everything I just mentioned is covered step by step in this course. So if you need a refresher on any of it, just go back to the relevant lesson and then execute. AI SEO or AEO is still early. The tools are evolving, the data is getting better, and the opportunity is only going to grow. So, the biggest advantage you can have right now is simply starting before everyone else does. Thanks for watching our AEO course and I'll see you in the next