SEO + AEO Visibility Strategy

Treat AEO/GEO as an extension of search visibility, not a replacement for SEO. Build a site that is easy to discover, index, understand, trust, retrieve, cite, and convert from. Make facts, entities, evidence, and brand identity explicit without inventing a separate set of unsupported “AI ranking factors.”

Operating principles

1. Start with business value and user tasks, then map search and answer-engine opportunities.
2. Fix discovery, indexability, canonicalization, rendering, and content-quality failures before pursuing marginal optimizations.
3. Prefer a small, coherent corpus of useful pages over scaled, lightly differentiated content.
4. Separate citation presence, brand mention, referral traffic, and conversion; they are different outcomes.
5. Treat third-party correlation studies as directional evidence, not proof of ranking factors.
6. Never guarantee rankings, indexing, rich results, citations, mentions, traffic, or revenue.
7. Revalidate platform-specific guidance before major implementation because crawler behavior, reporting, and search features change.

Workflow

1. Establish the decision context

Identify:

• site type, business model, audiences, markets, and conversion goals;
• domain stage: new/low-authority, established, migrated, or declining;
• important products, services, topics, entities, and locations;
• current content inventory, page families, technical stack, feeds, and structured data;
• available evidence from Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, analytics, crawls, server logs, rankings, backlinks, and prompt monitoring;
• constraints such as editorial capacity, engineering effort, legal review, seasonality, and reputation risk.

When evidence is missing, label assumptions and propose the smallest useful discovery step. An analysis request does not authorize account changes, publishing, outreach, deletion, redirects, or deployment.

2. Diagnose the visibility layer

Classify each problem or opportunity before recommending tactics:

Layer	Objective	Typical failure
Discovery	Get intended URLs found	Orphaned or blocked pages
Indexing	Store the correct canonical URL	Duplicates, thin pages, wrong canonicals
Retrieval	Match a query or question family	Broad but shallow coverage
Ranking	Outperform useful alternatives	Commodity content, weak proof, poor experience
Grounding/citation	Be selected as evidence	Claims are vague, buried, or unverifiable
Brand mention	Have the source entity named	Page cited without brand recognition
Conversion	Turn visibility into business value	Traffic without intent or trust

Do not prescribe a content campaign when the primary constraint is technical indexing, and do not prescribe technical work when the real gap is weak differentiation or reputation.

3. Choose a focused strategy portfolio

Read references/01-strategy-catalog.md to select only tactics that fit the site, stage, and evidence. Combine tactics into three horizons:

• Foundation: crawl/index hygiene, entity clarity, measurement, core commercial pages.
• Growth: intent coverage, internal linking, original evidence, selective authority building.
• Compounding: refresh/consolidation, reputation distribution, AI visibility monitoring, and expansion into proven page families.

Avoid presenting all 25 tactics as a checklist. Explain why each selected tactic fits, what it depends on, and what should wait.

When the strategy depends on audience choice, customer need, positioning, journey coverage, content structure, or conversion behaviour, read references/06-audience-positioning-and-content-frameworks.md. Select only the model that answers the current decision and record its inputs, output, evidence, and misuse risk.

4. Adapt by site type and maturity

Read references/02-site-playbooks.md for ecommerce, agency/professional services, brochure sites, publishers, SaaS, and local businesses. Use the new-versus-established sequence rather than applying the same order to every domain.

5. Define acceptance tests and measurement

Read references/03-measurement-and-myths.md. For every recommendation include:

• owner and implementation scope;
• prerequisite and risk;
• observable acceptance test;
• leading and outcome metrics;
• review window and stop/continue rule.

Measure useful indexed coverage, retrieval visibility, clicks, reputation, AI citations, explicit brand mentions, and commercial results separately. Do not use one vanity prompt or one third-party authority score as the success definition.

6. Revalidate current platform claims

Read references/04-sources.md when the plan depends on crawler directives, structured-data eligibility, feeds, reporting, generative-search features, or other time-sensitive platform behavior. Prefer current primary platform documentation. Date-stamp any claim whose validity could change.

Required output

Unless the user requests another format, provide:

1. Context and evidence summary, including unknowns.
2. Visibility-layer diagnosis.
3. Three-horizon strategy with no more than the highest-value initiatives in each horizon.
4. Prioritized roadmap showing impact, confidence, effort, dependency, owner, and acceptance test.
5. Page-family or content-system recommendations with indexability rules.
6. Measurement plan separating classic search, AI citation, brand mention, and conversion outcomes.
7. Risks, rejected shortcuts, and items requiring current platform verification.

Navigation

• references/INDEX.md — reference router.
• references/05-training-curriculum.md — use only when the user asks for a team or intern training program.
• references/06-audience-positioning-and-content-frameworks.md — use when audience, need, positioning, journey, content-system, or conversion choices need a substantive model.

Creator

Created for and maintained by Brownsmith Dynamics.