seo-aeolisted

# Solnest AEO: AI Visibility Audit ## Start here: what actually moves AI citations Do not skip this section. Most AEO advice on the internet is selling work that the controlled studies say does nothing. Get the ordering right and you save the client both money and disappointment. **Google's own position** (`developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide`, updated June 2026): > "From Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is > optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO." Google states plainly that you do **not** need llms.txt files, AI-specific content rewriting, special schema, or content chunking. Its wording on llms.txt is that such files "neither harm nor help." | Lever | Evidence | Priority | |---|---|---| | **Search-crawler access** | Blocking the wrong bot removes you entirely. Binary, and free to fix. | **1. Do first** | | **Ranking for the topic** | Google AI surfaces retrieve from the ordinary index. Seer: organic rank correlates 0.65. | **2** | | **Earned media / brand mentions** | Muck Rack, 25M cited links: earned media = 84% of AI citations, owned = 13.7%. Ahrefs, 75k brands: branded mentions 0.664 vs backlinks 0.218. | **3. Biggest lever** | | **Quotable specifics** (stats, quotes, named sources) | Princeton/Georgia Tech, KDD 2024. The only causal study in the field. Roughly +30% visibility. | **4** | | Schema / JSON-LD | Ahrefs difference-in-differences, 1,885 treated pages vs 4,000 controls: *