Why this matters

AI search is a visibility surface, not always a traffic channel. Some companies report strong conversion rates from AI-referred traffic; others see LLM referral volume flatten or shrink as products change. Be a presence, not a dependency.
AI Overviews reduce #1 CTR by 34.5%+ (industry studies, large keyword samples). When they appear, zero-click rate jumps to ~83%. The click traffic you used to earn is being converted into citations in someone else's answer.
AI brand recommendations are probabilistic, not deterministic. Multi-run studies across ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI show <1% chance of getting the same brand list from the same prompt, <0.1% chance of same order. Visibility percentage across many runs is the only reliable metric.
Platform divergence is extreme. 86% of top-cited sources are unique to each AI platform (industry research). Only 7 of the top 50 most-cited domains appear on all three major AI platforms. An AEO strategy for "AI" isn't coherent — you need a strategy per platform.

Process

AI visibility baseline assessment. Query ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Mode with customer-relevant prompts. Minimum 60-100 runs per prompt per platform for meaningful data. See references/measurement-protocol.md.
AI crawler access audit. robots.txt, Cloudflare, server logs, llms.txt, JS rendering. Without crawler access, citations are impossible.
Content optimization for AI citation. Apply the ski ramp (see seo-content-strategy for the full framework). Structure for extractability.
Entity and brand presence strategy. Third-party mentions, Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia, review platforms. Brands are 6.5x more likely to be cited via third-party sources than their own domains.
Platform-specific optimization. Apply the platform matrix below. See references/platform-profiles.md for detailed profiles.
Ongoing monitoring and measurement. Re-measure quarterly minimum. Track visibility percentage, not rank position.