Most SEO guides haven’t caught up to how people actually search now. This one has.
AI search engines don’t rank ten results and let users pick one. They construct a single answer and pull from sources they trust. If your site isn’t one of those sources, you’re invisible to a growing share of searchers — and the gap is widening every month.
The AEO Playbook covers exactly what it takes to change that.
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WHAT’S INSIDE (section header: “Eight chapters. No filler.”)
Why AEO requires a different strategy than SEO The mental model shift that changes how you approach every piece of content you publish.
How AI engines decide what to cite The four factors that determine whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI pulls from your site or your competitor’s.
Technical setup that actually matters Schema markup, llms.txt, crawlability for AI bots — what to implement, what to skip, and why.
How to write content that gets pulled into AI answers Specific structural techniques that make your content easier for AI engines to extract and use.
Building topical authority AI engines recognize Why a focused, consistently published site beats a high-domain-authority generalist every time.
Healthcare AEO A dedicated chapter on E-E-A-T, provider schema, YMYL content standards, and how patients are using AI to find care — relevant to anyone in or working with healthcare.
Measuring AI visibility What tools exist right now, what to track, and how to know if any of this is actually working.
A 90-day action plan Week by week, from technical audit to full topic cluster — so you know exactly what to do first.
WHO THIS IS FOR
This is written for SEO professionals who want to get ahead of where the industry is heading, in-house marketers trying to figure out why AI search is eating into their organic traffic, and business owners who want to understand the landscape well enough to make smart decisions.
No prior AEO experience required. If you know basic SEO, you’re ready for this.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (short version)
Joe Unhammer is a Senior SEO Strategist who has led organic search programs for enterprise healthcare clients including Baptist Health Systems and Healthfirst NY. He has spent the last several years specifically focused on AEO and GEO — optimizing content for AI-powered search engines before most agencies had a name for it.
This playbook is a distillation of what actually works, written for people who need to act on it, not just understand it in theory.
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Why free?
This site exists to be the clearest, most useful resource on AEO and AI search optimization available anywhere. Putting the playbook behind a paywall limits who reads it. If it’s useful to you, you’ll come back. That’s the deal.