The Three Pillars of AI Visibility

Strategies for increasing the frequency of your brand appearance in ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google AI Overviews responses are very inconsistent.

Working to create the most realistic formula for our AI visibility audits, we've generated hundreds of them.

We've noticed that regardless of industry or location, there are three pillars that, when properly optimized by a business, will make AI recommend you.

First of all, understand this - ChatGPT, Google, Claude, and Perplexity already know about you. When we talk about AI Visibility, most advice focuses on "getting noticed" by AI.

The reality, however, is more brutal. AI has already absorbed an incredible amount of information about the world and has constant access to the live web. What prevents you from being recommended by ChatGPT is a lower score than the competition. This score does not indicate the quality of service. Quality and reputation are indirect factors - they provide easy access to being mentioned in third-party media (e.g., rankings) or positive reviews. And these are already part of the first pillar.

First Pillar - Content You Don't Own

In other words, third-party sources - articles, rankings, news, directories, reviews, social posts, etc. This is the most important AEO point affecting your visibility. AI wants to minimize the risk associated with recommending you. It relies on sources that have already approved you. Treat every mention from a third-party entity as an earned point in your AI Visibility Score. The stronger and more important the entity is in your market (industry + location), the more points you get. AI wants to recommend those who are already recommended by someone credible.

If you query ChatGPT 100x (preferably in incognito mode) as your potential client would, you will notice that in the Sources tab, some domains appear unusually often. Depending on the market, these will be different sources. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the presence of your business in even a fraction of these most important sources increases the likelihood of being cited (selected) by AI. Pure probability.

The value of appearing in these sources is greater than ever, whether organic or paid media. The role of these information platforms is evolving into a fundamental layer of trust that AI prioritizes in its decision-making process. The value of a given source or the fee it can charge for placement is no longer calculated only in terms of audience, but also in the trust that AI has in that source.

Does this mean you should only target the highest caliber sources in your market? No, because if you're in Naples and ask for the best local pizza, the top choices will most often be supported by sources like the MICHELIN Guide, but you'll also find blogs like Roam & Thrive and directories like TripAdvisor.

Action to take: ask ChatGPT (a lot, in a temporary chat) for a recommendation within your market. Collect domains from the Sources tab. Map the most important ones across diversified source categories: articles, blogs, rankings, and directories. Make it your goal to appear there either organically, if possible, or via paid media.

Second Pillar - Content You Own

The goal here is to accomplish two things for two different paths that AI can take.

Allowing AI to officially verify information about you.

Allowing AI to "get a citation".

Let's first overview the latter. If you're the undisputed leader in your market or you rank very high in Google Search results (especially an important factor in Google AI Overviews), AI could already have made up its mind to recommend you, but technically, it wants to ground its answer with a citation. Because in this recommendations basket, it didn't use a third-party source, it just wants to quickly access your content, which you officially own, and cite it. This is where having easily citable, extractable texts (2-4 sentence paragraphs with independent value, FAQs, lists, etc.) matters. It just makes the AI's job easier.

But most often that's not the case when AI recommends you. Usually, and that's why the first pillar matters the most, it has already obtained a citation about you from a third-party source. Now, it can additionally want to verify this information against your official content. It accesses your website's pages (home, about, contact, services, products, menu, etc., depending on your industry), sometimes maybe your socials or blog. It looks for confirmation. Are you still operational? Does your product/service description match the user's intent? Location and working hours unchanged? Key employee still in the team?

Action to take: The most common advice is to make your copy easily citable with 2-4 sentence-long paragraphs, each providing an independent answer. This should be your secondary goal, and not in every text block, so that you won't look artificial to your real customers who read this. Most importantly, make sure that you've covered everything about your business, services, products, team, location, and whatever else you have. Treat the content you can edit as the source of truth for AI and allow it to verify the information it got from a strong third-party source. Make sure it's unified and up to date across all platforms (website, directories, and socials).

Third Pillar - Technical

It's connected with the 2nd one because it enables AI to access, read, and understand your website, which is the primary source of the content you own.

Does your website have complete and accurate JSON-LD? Is it crawlable, indexable, and renderable? As we said, AI very often wants to verify information about your entity using your own official source. This is the place where people ask if AEO isn't just a hyped SEO. In our opinion, a good SEO is fundamental for AI Visibility, but it doesn't cover it all (read the first two Pillars). Making your pages accessible and understandable for AI enables the verification step we've covered before.

Action to take: Add JSON-LD schema, check if your whole content isn't initially fully hidden behind JS (you might need SSR then), is your meta title and description clear and literal, is your website crawlable and indexable?

Technical audit is the simplest one, but at aeoh, we cover all three layers you can fix to improve your AI Visibility. What are the sources that influence AI most in your market? Is your content consistent across platforms and understandable for AI? Is your website accessible and readable for machines?