A B2B professional services brand with zero AI visibility built a systematic AEO strategy and tracked every step. Here's exactly what they did — week by week.
Build Your AEO Strategy FreeAn HR technology consulting firm with 12 years in business, strong client reviews, and a decent domain authority (DA 38) had exactly zero AI citations. Running their target queries — "best HR technology consultant," "who helps with HRIS implementation," "HR tech consulting firms" — across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini returned their competitors' names, not theirs.
The reason was straightforward: their website content was written for human readers, not AI extraction. Long narrative paragraphs. No schema markup. No direct-answer format. Robots.txt blocking all AI crawlers. And almost no third-party brand mentions outside of LinkedIn.
"We asked ChatGPT who the best HR tech consultants were and we weren't on the list. Neither were we on Perplexity. We'd been in this business for 12 years and AI had no idea we existed. That felt like a real problem."
— Managing PartnerRemoved GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot from robots.txt disallow list. Created and deployed llms.txt listing 22 key pages. Added Organization schema to homepage. Citations: still 0, but AI engines can now read the site.
Each service page now opens with: "We help [audience] with [specific problem] by [specific approach]." Clear, factual, front-loaded. Added FAQPage schema with 4-6 questions per page. Citations: still 0, but content is now extraction-ready.
Perplexity cited the firm's HRIS implementation guide as a source for "how does HRIS implementation work?" First citation ever. The technical fixes and content restructuring were working. Citation count: 1/week.
Published 12 direct-answer articles covering every sub-question in the HRIS implementation topic: "how long does HRIS implementation take," "what does HRIS implementation cost," "HRIS implementation checklist," etc. Citations climbed to 4/week by end of week 7.
Contributed 3 articles to SHRM-affiliated publications. Got listed in 2 HR tech vendor comparison guides. Updated Clutch.co and G2 profiles with detailed capability descriptions. Citations: 7/week by week 10, now appearing in ChatGPT answers for the first time.
Published a 500-person survey report on HR tech adoption rates. Within 2 weeks, earned 8 inbound citations from other publications. Citations jumped to 12/week. The firm was now appearing in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini answers for category queries.
Removing AI crawlers from robots.txt and adding llms.txt had the fastest impact — within 3 weeks, Perplexity was indexing and citing content. Don't underestimate the technical layer.
The content rewrite was the highest-ROI single activity. Pages that formerly buried the answer in paragraph 3 got cited after moving the answer to sentence 1. Structural, not just semantic.
The single benchmark report generated more citations than the previous 12 weeks of content work combined. Original data that other sites want to reference is the fastest path to rapid citation growth.
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