Category: AEO

Digital PR has always been about earning coverage that influences the audience you can’t reach through paid channels. While the value proposition of digital PR hasn’t changed, the definition of “showing up” has.

Clients are asking about AEO. Some have seen competitors show up in AI results and want to know what it means. Others have read that AI is changing how buyers find vendors and want to know what their agency is doing about it.

Today, when a buyer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Mode a question, they rarely see a list of suggested links. They see one synthesized answer that cites a handful of sources. If your brand is one of those citations, you win attention, traffic, and trust. If it isn’t, you’re invisible, even when you rank on page one.

Link-building and content outreach were built for search engines. Domain authority, anchor text, and referring domains were the signals that moved search rankings, and they translated directly into an SEO playbook you could run at scale. Answer engines don’t work the same way.

If you’ve been asked to diagnose and fix AEO gaps, the first step is to conduct an audit. For most brands, an AEO gap is any reason an AI answer engine can’t (or won’t) use its page as a source.

AI search optimization tools help marketers understand where a brand appears in AI-generated answers, which sources earn citations, and what to improve next. They complement traditional SEO tools rather than replace them: SEO measures rankings, clicks, and organic traffic, while AI-search tooling adds visibility signals such as mentions, citations, sentiment, and answer accuracy.

A vector embedding is a numerical representation created by an embedding model. The model converts text into a list of numbers that can be compared with other vectors, helping a retrieval system find passages with similar meaning even when they use different words. Semantic retrieval is one tool AI systems can use to find source material; modern retrieval can also combine semantic search with keyword search and other relevance signals.

If you’ve searched “Profound versus Athena AI for AEO,” you’ve probably already hit a wall: every comparison you find is written by a competitor, an affiliate, or the vendors themselves.

An AEO checker tells you whether the AI answers your buyers rely on actually mention your brand. People increasingly ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini a question and act on the reply without clicking a link, so visibility that once showed up in your rankings can vanish into an answer you never see.

This Scrunch vs. Peec AI comparison evaluates how both tools measure AI answer engine representation across different buyer segments, price points, and feature scopes.