The AEO Field Guide
How to tell if ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude cite your B2B brand.
Forty percent of buyer queries now start in an AI interface, not a Google search box. If the engines are not citing your business when buyers ask questions in your category, you are invisible to a meaningful slice of your pipeline, and traditional SEO metrics will not show it. This is the operator’s view: a vendor-neutral plan to baseline your AI citation rate, deploy the right measurement stack, and read what the numbers mean for revenue.
What’s inside the Field Guide
Why AEO measurement is non-negotiable now
Forty percent of buyer queries now start in an AI interface. Top-three organic pages lost 18 to 34 percent of their clicks once AI answers appeared above them, with rankings unchanged. If the engines do not cite you in 2026, they will not in 2027 either.
How the four engines actually cite businesses
ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews pull from different sources and reward different content shapes. Includes the engine-by-engine comparison table so you know what to optimize first for each.
The three metrics that matter, plus the Visibility Triangle
Share of LLM, Citation Position, and Sentiment, and the single operator dashboard that combines them. Stop tracking page views. These are the numbers that map to pipeline.
The tool landscape, ranked for B2B operators
HubSpot AEO, OpenLens, and Otterly AI: what each tracks, what it costs, and exactly when to use it, plus the measurement stack we run for Flywheel and every client.
The 30/60/90 implementation playbook
Baseline, optimize, compound. The week-by-week plan we run with clients and on Flywheel itself, from defining tracked queries to building the third-party citation surfaces that drive 96 percent of AI citations.
Flywheel's own Day Zero baseline
We publish our own Share of LLM, starting from zero, and re-run it in the open. The public scoreboard, not the agency pitch. If we cannot move our own number, we cannot tell you how to move yours.
Get the Field Guide
The three metrics, the tool landscape ranked for B2B operators, and the 30/60/90 plan to take your Share of LLM from invisible to established.
Download the Field Guide (PDF)Free PDF, opens in your browser. Read more from Flywheel on the blog.
The public scoreboard
We run the playbook on ourselves, in the open.
The day we shipped this guide, Flywheel’s Share of LLM was zero. Not cited in a single AI answer for any of the canonical queries our content targets. We publish the starting line and re-run the baseline in the open, because if a playbook works, the people selling it should be willing to show their own number moving.
0%
Day Zero Share of LLM
25
Tracked queries
3 engines
ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity
Public
Baseline re-run in the open
Frequently asked questions
What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?
AEO is the practice of getting your brand cited in AI-generated answers, the ones ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews produce when a buyer asks a question in your category. It is the AI-era counterpart to SEO: where SEO optimizes for blue links on a results page, AEO optimizes for inclusion in the answer itself.
What is Share of LLM?
Share of LLM is the AEO equivalent of share of voice. It is the percentage of your tracked queries that produce an AI answer mentioning your brand, averaged across the engines you care about. Under 5 percent is functionally invisible, 15 to 30 percent is an established player, and above 30 percent is a category leader.
Which AEO measurement tool should I use?
If you are on HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise, start with HubSpot AEO. If you are not, start with OpenLens, which is free and the only one of the three that tracks Claude. Layer Otterly AI on top when you need competitor-level diagnostics. The guide ranks all three by fit for B2B operators and explains the trade-offs.
How long before AEO work shows results?
Expect measurable movement on the queries you target within 60 days and a real Share of LLM shift by 90. Claude specifically lags the others because it leans on training data rather than live search, so the content you publish now shows up in next year's model retrain.
How is AEO content different from SEO content?
SEO content is built for Google ranking: long essays, keyword coverage, time on page. AEO content is built for extraction: the question in the H1, the answer in the first 100 words, data-dense structured sections the engines can lift cleanly. Same topics, different shape.
Can a non-developer run this?
Yes. The 30/60/90 plan is operator-level work: define your tracked queries, install a measurement tool, capture a baseline, and close the highest-leverage gaps. No code required to start measuring or to run the first 90 days.
Want your baseline run for you?
Book a Phase 0 audit. We run your tracked queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini, baseline your Share of LLM and Visibility Triangle, and identify the five highest-leverage content moves for the next 60 days. Two weeks, fixed scope, no commitment beyond the engagement.
Book a Phase 0 audit