THE AEO PLaybook
Your highest-intent customers are asking AI what to buy
Is your competitor getting the recommendation?
a step-by-step system to get your brand cited across chatgpt, perplexity, gemini, claude & ai overviews
Why AEO Content Matters Now
AI search doesn’t rank, it recommends.
When consumers ask questions like “What’s the best retinol for sensitive skin under $50?”, AI creates a shortlist before a click ever happens.
If your product isn’t clearly understood, AI fills in the gaps — often with competitors.
AEO content gives brands control over how they’re described at the exact moment of intent.
We translate brand content into machine-understandable signals,
so AI platforms recommend your products with confidence
sloane delivers
AI Recommendation Presence
Your products surface as named recommendations in AI answers — not generic alternatives.
Trust & Validation Signals
Aligned brand and creator content that reinforces credibility and reduces AI misinterpretation.
Decision Acceleration
Clear AI explanations that shorten the path from question to checkout.
Competitive Visibility Intelligence
Insight into how AI describes your brand versus competitors — and where you’re losing or winning share.
-
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring your brand, content, and website so that AI-powered answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Claude) understand, trust, and cite your brand in their responses.
Where traditional SEO optimizes for Google rankings, AEO optimizes for AI recommendations. When someone asks an AI what to buy, which brand is best, or how to solve a problem your product addresses AEO content determines whether your brand gets served as a recommendation or gets skipped.
-
SEO and AEO share technical foundations but optimize for different outcomes. SEO optimizes for search engine rankings, backlink authority, and click-through rates.
AEO optimizes for AI citations, brand mentions in AI-generated answers, and the structured signals that make AI engines trust your content enough to recommend it.
You can have strong SEO and still be completely invisible on ChatGPT and Perplexity. AEO closes that gap. It does not replace SEO. AEO is an additional layer. If your SEO foundations are solid, you are already ahead of most brands starting AEO.
-
Your highest-intent customers are already asking AI what to buy. Perplexity now handles over 500 million monthly searches. ChatGPT browse mode is standard in how millions of people research purchases. Google AI Overviews appear at the top of most commercial queries.
When an AI engine answers "what is the best [your category] brand," it cites two or three sources it trusts and skips everyone else. Brands investing in AEO now are building a compounding visibility advantage.
These brands surface as recommendations for consumers who are ready to buy their products.
-
The five major AI platforms consumer brands need visibility on are ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Claude. Each platform cites brands differently and requires a slightly different audit approach.
ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews cite specific URLs and drive direct traffic. Claude works from training data shaped by high-authority sources. The metric to track here is whether Claude or ChatGPT names your brand in a recommendation, not whether it links to you. A named brand mention in an AI search response is a significant AI visibility signal, even without a URL citation.
-
Run a manual AI visibility audit. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Claude in fresh browser tabs.
Search for the problems your product solves, not your brand name, but the category queries your customer actually types. Note which brands appear, which get cited with a URL, and where your brand appears or does not.
Then search your brand name directly and note what AI says about you.
What you find is your AEO gap: the distance between where you are and where you need to be.
The Sloane AEO Playbook includes a structured and more in-depth 5-step version of this audit with a built-in Query Tracker that maps results across all five platforms in one place.
-
No. However, AEO does require implementing schema markup (structured data code), but the Sloane AEO Playbook is Claude-integrated.
This means Claude writes the JSON-LD code for you based on your brand details and tells you exactly where to paste it in your Shopify, Squarespace, or custom site.
The playbook is built for founders and brand marketers, not developers. If you can copy and paste, you can implement schema.Item description
-
The Sloane AEO Playbook is a 3-phase system for getting your brand cited across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Claude. The 3 phases:
Phase 1 — AI Visibility Audit: 5 steps that map exactly where your brand appears and where it does not across every major AI engine, with a built-in Query Tracker across all 5 platforms.
Phase 2 — AEO Content Sprint: 4 work streams that build your citation infrastructure: schema implementation, AEO content pages, editorial citation building, and social pipeline. This is where you go from invisible to cited.
Phase 3 — Maintain and Monitor: A monthly operating checklist that compounds your visibility advantage over time.
Also includes: Brand Setup with Claude integration, a Schema Cheat Sheet ordered by AEO impact, and Claude prompts at every step.
Beginner-friendly. Built by a brand marketer, not a developer.
-
Schema markup is structured data added to your website in JSON-LD format.
It tells AI engines exactly what a page is, who wrote it, what questions it answers, and what products it describes.
Without schema, AI has to guess. When it guesses wrong or cannot guess at all, the page does not get cited.
FAQPage schema is the highest-impact type for brands starting out because it explicitly signals that your page answers specific questions, which is exactly what AI engines are looking for.
Organization schema is second, establishing your brand identity site-wide.
These two alone move the needle faster than anything else in AEO.
The Sloane AEO Playbook includes a Schema Cheat Sheet with every schema type ordered by AEO impact.
