The AEO Playbook: How to Get Cited & Stay Visible via @sejournal, @hethr_campbell

AI crawlers now visit your website thousands of times without sending back a single visitor.

That reversal of the web’s old economics set the frame for a recent Search Engine Journal webinar with Conductor. Pat Reinhart, VP of Services and Thought Leadership at Conductor, and Lindsay Boyajian Hagan, VP of Marketing at Conductor, walked through the AEO Playbook: how brands earn citations in AI answers and stay visible as buyers stop clicking through to websites.

Their core argument: your next customer may never reach page one. Buyers get answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and AI Overviews before they see a results page, so your brand has to be visible where those answers form.

The session covered how to find the prompts your brand needs to win, how to move from a passing mention to a positive recommendation, and which of the four pillars of AI visibility to fix first.

Register to watch the full session on demand, and get the complete playbook.

Why AI Crawlers Hit Your Site Thousands Of Times But Send No Traffic

Why is organic traffic falling while impressions climb? Because the physics of the web changed.

In the old model, Google crawled your site roughly twice for every visitor it sent. Today, AI crawlers visit sites thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of times while sending back little or no traffic.

Conductor sees the shift in its own Search Console data: impressions keep rising while clicks fall. More people than ever are searching for help, and more of them read the answer inside the LLM.

Pat was direct about what that means for reporting: “The goal here is not traffic, because traffic is going to naturally go down as people are educating themselves on LLM surfaces.”

So what belongs on the dashboard instead? Pat walked through the metrics that replace traffic in the full session. If your executive reporting still leads with organic sessions, watch it on demand before your next reporting cycle.

The Average AI Prompt Is 23 Words. Your Keyword Strategy Was Built For 4.

How do you find the AI prompts your brand needs to show up for? Not with a keyword list.

The average AI prompt runs 23 words. The average Google keyword runs three to four. That extra length carries context a keyword never could: a runner with wide feet on rough city terrain asks a very different question than “best running shoes,” and the LLM recommends whichever brand answered those specifics.

Prompts are near infinite, and no brand can chase all of them. Pat and Lindsay’s answer is a custom prompt index, the foundation Conductor builds before touching a single piece of content.

Lindsay called it a turning point for her own team: “That was sort of a big unlock for me in terms of our marketing strategy.”

The session walks through how the prompt index gets built and scored, including the one pairing Pat calls the most important ingredient. Watch it on demand to see the method.

How To Get ChatGPT To Recommend Your Brand, Not Just Mention It

What separates a citation that drives pipeline from one that does nothing? Not every mention is created equal.

Conductor plots every brand mention on a spectrum, and the goal sits at the top: a disproportionately positive recommendation, where ChatGPT names you as the authority when someone asks for the best product in your category.

That makes brand sentiment a search problem, and it pulls teams into the work that Pat admits was never on his bingo card when AI search arrived.

One channel outperforms everything else in Conductor’s data. “YouTube is the number one cited site across all major LLMs,” Pat said. The reason why, and what it means for your content plan, is in the session.

See where your brand sits on the mention spectrum and which activities move you up it.

If ChatGPT Cites Reddit For Your Topic, That’s Your Opening

What does it mean when an LLM cites Reddit for a topic you should own? The model found no better source.

“LLMs only really cite Reddit when there’s no other good source out there,” Lindsay explained. “So if you see Reddit, that’s a good indicator that the LLM is craving content.”

Pat put it more bluntly: “They’re never going to not give you an answer. If you’re seeing Reddit there, that means that no brand out there has a really good answer and they’d rather quote the conversation happening on a subreddit, which is wild.”

Spotting the signal is the easy part. The session covers what to do next: the content plays that close the gap, the freshness signals LLMs actually read, and why Lindsay warns that the technical layer is now “really, really important, or you will be invisible.”

It also walks through real examples from Guitar Center, Bass Pro, Chewy, Twilio, and Verizon, and closes with the AEO maturity model that most companies sit at the bottom of.

Find your stage in the maturity model and see what to fix first.

Q&A: Most Helpful Questions From The Webinar

Q: How do you track recommendations across thousands of prompts?

Pat answered: don’t track everything. Teams that take “digestible chunks are typically ones that are more successful,” while teams that monitor too much land in analysis paralysis. He and Lindsay shared the exact structure Conductor’s own marketing team uses to keep thousands of prompts readable, and it’s in the recording.

Q: LLMs want fresh content. Should you update the publish date when you refresh a page?

Pat answered: performance decides. If a page keeps earning citations, “leave it be,” regardless of age. And “don’t just go in and change the date” to look fresher. The signals LLMs actually read, and the moment a refresh becomes worth doing, are covered in the recording.

Q: For a small team, where’s the first place to focus to start getting cited?

Lindsay answered: it depends on whether your problem is missing content or content that exists but never gets cited, and the starting move differs for each. She shared the single change Conductor made that turned its densest content into LLM seed material, and Pat added a shortcut that he called “a gold mine for a small team.” Both are in the recording.

Q: Do backlinks still matter for AI search?

Pat answered: they keep their traditional-search value, but for AI visibility “I don’t think backlinks have much importance at all.” His own track record: “I haven’t built a link in like 20 years and I’ve never had a problem getting a site to rank.” What he weighs instead of link equity for AI search is in the recording.

Watch the Full Webinar

The full session includes the complete prompt-index build, the four pillars of AI visibility, the mention spectrum framework, the stage-by-stage AEO maturity model, and a live demo from the Conductor team.

Register and watch it on demand now.