AEO Guide
A Practical Guide to Answer Engine Optimization
This guide shares insights from our ongoing research into how AI-powered search systems surface answers and cite sources, with practical guidance for improving visibility.
AI hasn’t replaced search, but it has reshaped brand discovery.
AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude are changing how people find answers, but they haven’t replaced traditional search. To maintain visibility in a fragmented search environment, you need a unified strategy that works across AI-powered platforms and conventional search experiences.
At Victorious, we’re integrating answer engine optimization (AEO) into comprehensive SEO strategies that build brand recognition everywhere your customers search.Â
Our team runs structured experiments that inform those strategies, examining how AI systems surface information, what influences citations, and how visibility differs across AI-powered search experiences.
With this guide, we’re opening the doors to our learning lab so you can experiment alongside our strategists and engineers. We’ll continue sharing what we learn about AEO and practical ways to improve your visibility in AI search.
Last updated: 1/12/2026
How AI Retrieval Works
Find out why RAG systems cite content to center your strategy on the pages that can increase your AI visibility.
Is Your Site AEO-Ready?
Check these five technical components that impact whether AI bots can crawl and cite your content.
AEO Content Strategy
Learn how to structure and prioritize content for retrieval and citation by AI systems like Google’s AI Overviews.
Measure AI Visibility
Track your brand’s citations and mentions alongside traditional SEO metrics to benchmark AEO progress.
Get The Team On Board
Secure buy-in from stakeholders to start testing AEO hypothesis and improve your AI visibility.
Maintain Strategic Focus
Use entity signals as a reference point to interpret AI search volatility and guide strategic decisions.
Victorious AEO Research
Go Beyond AEO Basics
We're committed to creating clarity and sharing helpful research to inform your approach to AEO.
Victorious analyzed 1,540 real-world queries to map how AI overviews and AI Mode cite and display domains.
We built our own retrievability scoring system to help our clients boost visibility in AI-powered search. Here’s how it works—and how structure affects whether AI systems cite your content.
Spot the technical gaps that keep AI search platforms from citing your content with our easy-to-use checklist. Integrate this QA into your workflows to improve AI retrievability.
Are you losing ground to competitors in AI search?
Shifts in search behavior raise new questions about brand discovery, customer consideration, and competitive positioning.
Let’s talk about what’s changing in your market and how we can help evolve your search strategy.