AEO, What You Need to Know, Part III - Four Columns Marketing

What should we be doing to get our website in line with best AEO/GEO practices?

There are a number of things you can and should do—those are at the end of this blog, but there are a few “mindset matters” items I want to touch on first, because there is a LOT of ultra-trendy content about this on my feed, and probably some on yours too.

#1: Why Human Content Still Matters

One of the things we do best at Four Columns is writing on behalf of our clients. We’ve got a complicated client base and our copy team is truly next-level when it comes to zipping up the learning curve of a new industry. Part of how we do that is that we merge primary research with client conversation and a healthy attitude towards fact-checking. We transplant the expertise and experience of our clients into content, and that’s helped us generate growth in this SEO/AEO space. A lot of those clients started from a place of “there’s no way you can write about us, we’re too complicated” and we happily proved them wrong—before generative AI was a thing.

With generative AI available en masse, there is a temptation to say “we’ll just use AI to write it” and believe me—I get it. These blogs take me an hour or two, because I’m second-guessing and fact-checking myself at a human rate of speed, while AI could do it in (literally) seconds.

However—

Think back to the EEAT concept from the previous blog. My experience in this albeit new field comes through in how I talk about it. I have first-hand experience in how to address changing algorithms, what the numbers are actually indicating and how to implement the tactics I’m recommending to you. AI is not uninvolved in my process—it’s helping research primary sources, it fact checks my final drafts and even helped me with the format of the three-blog series—but every word here is my own because my practical experience in this subject is inherently detectable in how I’ve talked about it.

That’s not bravado. In a 16-month study of 140 domains, pure AI-written content ranked lower across difficulty levels, and that gap has likely widened since Google released a pair of updates in March/April 2026 that specifically penalized mass-produced AI content and upped the contribution of verifiable expertise. It’s worth noting that content where humans took what I’ll call the “perfectionist editor” approach (content written with AI assistance) was significantly closer to the human-only baseline. Ultimately what matters here is whether the finished piece is reflecting real expertise, an original point of view and good editorial instincts, all of which are difficult for AI to replicate.

How Backlinks Change

If you don’t know what a backlink is—it’s when another website links to your website. Since that definition is more superficial than a celebrity spray-tan, I recommend you read this blog to learn more. I’m going to throw out terms in this section that assume you know some of this background information, as fully explaining it and then getting into AEO will take up more space than you likely want to read.

Again, this is a place where authority comes into play. The content on your website can claim expertise and authority—and if no one on the internet backs that up, you’re going to be left wondering why all of your beautiful, hard-worked content isn’t getting you the results you want.

You will only get by with a little help from your friends.

The extended analogy I’ll use here is LinkedIn, a platform whose 2026 algorithm updates actually mirror some of the same principles.

Scenario 1
You receive a LinkedIn message from someone offering you a product that will make your business more profitable. You always want to do that, so you click on the profile and go check this person out. You see that they have less than 100 connections, the company they work for has fewer than 10 employees and the posts they have are shares of a company page or mixed-quality content.

Scenario 2
You receive a LinkedIn message from someone offering you a product that will make your business more profitable, but when you click on their profile, you see that they have 500+ connections, including three 1st degree connections and a couple dozen second-degree connections. The company they work for only has 11-50 employees but their content feed has shared content and original content they’ve clearly posted themselves, plus they have endorsements from colleagues on a wide range of skills.

Do I even need to ask who you’re going to follow up with?

This, at a high level, is pretty similar to how the algorithms that determine page rankings and inclusion in AI citations determine who to trust. They look at what websites are linking to you, how trusted those other websites are and how, specifically, they’re linking to your site.

What’s interesting about AEO is that an actual link to your site isn’t all that matters anymore. Some studies suggest that third-party mentions on sources you can’t control matter substantially more to AEO than traditional backlinks, though that’s really comparing apples to orangutans.

Ahrefs Study: 75,000 Established Brands
Mentions of a brand correlated 3x more strongly with AI Overview visibility than backlinks. While correlation is not proof of causation, it tracks with other studies.
Stacker + Scrunch: Controlled Distribution Study
The same content earned an 8% citation rate on the brand’s own site compared to 34% distributed through third-party outlets.

So what do you need to do? Treat your business network like your LinkedIn network. If you have allies in your industry, you should proactively reach out to them about backlinks and collaborative mentions. Develop specific, complementary content plans so you don’t get parked in a directory of links. Scratch some backs, get some scratches in return.

Be Patient with the Data Picture

This has been a frustrating year for the team at 4C that directs SEO and AEO strategy—and it’s not because things are changing (we’re used to that!), it’s because there are no tools on the market that can truly capture the whole view of AEO with anything like the accuracy of SEO tracking. And I’m not entirely sure there ever will be.

One last analogy for you—imagine you’re a Kindergarten teacher and in lesson planning, you want to think of all the different ways they can ask the question:

“Why is the sky blue?”

How many different versions of that question can you come up with in your head?

“How come the sky is blue?”
“Is there a reason why the sky is blue?”
“What makes the sky blue?”
“Why is sky blue?”

Each of those questions hides a subtly different understanding of causation that would change how a ‘perfect’ teacher would answer each version of the question. A practical human would likely consolidate and streamline, but AI has no such restraint at the moment.

Now take that analogy and put 5-6 teachers in the same classroom, each with their own way of finding the answer to the subtleties of each question. Now add in the fact that none of those teachers (and none of the AI models) will ever answer the same question the same way twice.

When we track SEO keywords, we put the keyword into an SEO tool, we specify the search engines we care about, and the system runs regularly scheduled queries to see where that keyword is ranking week to week. That’s way over-simplified, but it’s good enough for where I’m going with this.

Prompt tracking, like keyword tracking, is also not fluid—it is specific. The prompt phrasing is tracked exactly as it is included in the platform, with no accounting for variation. Each of those prompts needs to be tracked across a wider range of engines than anything SEO has established, and to test those prompts (in some cases) you need to burn tokens. That greatly ramps resource usage compared to SEO and ignores that keywords had the simplicity of being short, caveman-like phrases, while prompt tracking is as varied as human language. There are dozens of ways to ask “why’s the sky that color” in English, and that’s not even touching on what this looks like for global companies.

Should you give up? No, but you should make sure you have realistic expectations around how much insight you’re going to have in this topic, barring some major sea-change in the tools available to content marketers. The solution I’d offer is that you do need tools, but you also need experts (like us) who understand how search has changed, what AEO content done well looks like, and how to roll with the punches of a field that will never stop changing.

As Promised, Some Practical Considerations For Your Brand

Whether or not you can accomplish this on your own is ultimately down to the level of expertise and bandwidth of your team. If you need help, you know where to find it.

Remember, it’s Answer Engine Optimization
You should be using questions as section headers wherever appropriate, and you should lead that section with an ‘answer capsule’ that’s about 40-60 words long. That answer is the most-cited piece of content, so answer the question first, then fill in the context.
Be Original
This is a hard one, but writing from original data, a proprietary approach or something you actually produced is the one thing AI can’t reproduce on its own. That’s why it gets cited instead of ten paraphrased, unbacked versions competing with you. It’s not that the engines reward you for being human, per se; it’s that being human is how you make something worth citing. Real stats win.
Yes, Your Blog Needs An Author
Assigning an author isn’t optional, it’s optimal. They need a short bio that reinforces why they’re a subject matter expert in the area, and there should even be ‘Person’ schema built in, since pages with all of these boxes check show up way more often than those that don’t.
Schema Your Site
You need to make sure your entire website has continuous, well-implemented schema, and then you need to validate it with Google’s Rich Results Test before you miss any crucial gaps. It’s actually pretty easy to get this wrong, and it’s something that’s best handled by an actual web developer.
Structure for Extraction
The format of your content matters for AI citation. A lot of these are carryover rules from SEO—one H1, descriptive H2s in question format where logical, short paragraphs and tables and lists whenever it makes sense. Walls of text aren’t what AI wants to grab.
Name Names
As often as allowed or possible, reference specific people, companies, products and concepts in your space. There’s a concept here called ‘entity density’ that I’d define as “how many names you dropped per paragraph” that signals to AI that you actually know this space.
Oh So You Thought PR Was Dead?
Earned mentions on other sites are (part of) the new PR, really, and this is a really tricky space. It can’t be faked, and credibility varies widely. It’s worth strategizing extensively before you start spending actual money pursuing this.
Keep Your Website Fresh
(Our clients aren’t going to like this, but…) Pages updated within the last 30-60 days get cited more than pages that never change. We’re not just talking about blog content here, but the actual core of your website, too. What’s more, these can’t be tiny insignificant changes, they need to be substantive.
Write Cleanly & Directly
In other words, don’t write like I wrote these blogs. I’ve actively ignored plenty of best practices in this series because the level of competition around this space is absurd. Most SEO best practices recommend writing to a middle school reading level—and while that’s good general advice, it’s worth more technical brands testing whether that rule actually holds, since content that’s that simple can risk losing substance.
Measure + Interpret
You should be watching what’s happening to your organic search traffic and monitoring your AEO equity using whatever tools you have available—but you should make sure you have the knowledge to accurately interpret the data, too. Nothing about this field is a single data-point decision.

Joseph “Joe” Gastler is the Chief Marketing Officer at Four Columns Marketing and an adjunct lecturer in marketing at Baylor University. He received his MBA from Baylor University with a concentration in marketing. He is certified in Google Search and has over ten years of experience managing SEO strategies, building websites and directing content mixes for hundreds of website projects.