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ThinkMedia

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AEO Services

Answer Engine Optimization: getting your business named inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews — not just ranked below them.

Get a free auditOur results
of large brands
16%
Clients served
60+
Ad spend managed
$20M+
Years operating
3

systematically track their performance in AI-powered search. McKinsey projects $750 billion in US consumer spending will flow through AI-powered search by 2028.

McKinsey CMO survey, Fortune 500 consumer brands, 2025–2026

More than six in ten Google searches now end without a single click, because the answer already appeared on the results page. So the question is no longer only where you rank — it is whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews mention you at all. Most large companies have no way of knowing.

AEO is new enough that almost nobody has this right yet, including agencies selling it.

ThinkMedia provides AEO services for companies spending $5,000 or more a month on marketing: structuring your content, your data, and your third-party presence so AI engines can find you, trust you, and cite you by name when a buyer asks a question in your category.

Four failures show up constantly:

  1. 01

    No measurement at all. Most companies have detailed dashboards for Google rankings and zero visibility into whether they're mentioned in an AI answer. The first time anyone notices a competitor has taken over a category's AI answers is usually when a client mentions it in a sales call.

  2. 02

    Content written to rank, not to be quoted. A page can hold position one on Google and still never get lifted into an AI Overview or a ChatGPT answer. AI systems extract self-contained, directly-answerable passages, and most SEO content buries the actual answer three paragraphs into a preamble.

  3. 03

    All the effort spent on the company's own website, none on the sources AI models actually trust. Roughly 85% of AI brand mentions come from third-party pages — review sites, forums, comparison content, YouTube, Reddit — not brand-owned domains (AirOps analysis of over 21,000 brand mentions, 2026).

  4. 04

    No FAQ schema, no structured data, and no entity clarity. A page might contain the right answer, but nothing marks it as an answer. An AI system, or a featured snippet, can't safely lift and quote it out of context if nothing signals that it's meant to stand alone.

How this runs

What you get.

Reporting
a monthly written report showing your AI citation and mention rate against the baseline, next to traditional rankings and organic traffic — including where visibility dropped or a page stopped getting cited, not just the wins. Alongside it, a live dashboard you can check any day.
Access
your analytics properties and any AEO tracking tools are set up under your business identity from day one. On exit, you keep the baseline data, the tracked prompt history, and everything built on your site — because none of it was ever ours.
Communication
a named strategist who runs your AEO work directly, reachable by Slack, email, or scheduled call, with a response commitment of one business day.
Terms
thirty days' notice, no annual minimum, no lock-in, flat fee. AEO is new enough that no honest agency should be asking you to commit to a year of it upfront.

What's included

The actual thing we do, and how often.

  • onboarding

    AI visibility baseline audit

    mapping how your brand currently appears — or doesn't — across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode for the questions your buyers actually ask, before any content work starts.

  • ongoing, 2–4 pages/month

    Answer-first content restructuring

    rewriting priority pages so the direct answer sits in the first sentence of each section, in a self-contained passage that reads correctly if quoted with no surrounding context — the actual mechanism AI systems and featured snippets both extract from.

  • ongoing

    FAQ and structured data implementation

    FAQPage schema, entity markup, and other structured data added to priority pages, since machine-readable structure is one of the clearest, most controllable levers for citation eligibility.

  • monthly

    Third-party citation strategy

    identifying and pursuing presence on the review sites, comparison pages, and community platforms — Reddit and YouTube alone account for a large share of AI citation sources — that AI models actually cite, since your own website is a minority input into most AI answers.

  • quarterly

    Entity clarity and consistency audit

    checking that your business name, description, and key facts are consistent across your site, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and other entity sources AI systems cross-reference to build confidence in a citation.

  • monthly

    AI citation tracking

    monitoring whether and how often your brand appears across tracked prompts in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Overviews, reported alongside traditional rankings, not instead of them.

  • monthly

    Competitive share-of-answer reporting

    what share of AI answers in your category name you versus your top three competitors, since AI visibility is heavily concentrated toward category leaders and the gap is the actual thing worth tracking.

  • one-time, low priority

    llms.txt implementation

    added as basic hygiene for the agentic web, with an honest caveat below on what it will and won't do for citations today.

How we work

Four phases, always in this order.

  1. Visibility Teardown

    Days 1–14

    We run your priority buyer questions through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews and record exactly what comes back: are you named, are you cited with a link, are you absent, and who is showing up instead. This becomes your baseline. Most companies have never seen this data before, because almost nobody is tracking it yet.

  2. Entity Blueprint

    Days 10–21

    A plan for who AI systems need to understand you are before they'll cite you: consistent business facts across your site and third-party entity sources, a prioritized list of pages to restructure for answer-first extraction, and a target list of third-party sources worth pursuing, given that most AI mentions come from outside your own domain.

  3. Content Build

    Days 18–45

    We restructure priority content and implement structured data in stages, testing citation impact as we go rather than rewriting the entire site at once. What we deliberately do not do: promise a specific citation count or ranking position. No agency can currently guarantee placement inside a model's generated answer, and any that does is selling you a number nobody can actually deliver.

  4. Citation Compounding

    Ongoing

    Ongoing content, third-party citation work, and monthly tracking against the baseline, with quarterly entity audits as AI platforms change how they select and weight sources — which happens often enough that a one-time AEO project goes stale within a couple of quarters.

Honest scoping

Who this is for, and who it isn't.

You're a good fit if you're already spending $5,000 or more a month on marketing, with an established content presence or the budget to build one, competing in a category where buyers are already asking AI tools comparison and recommendation questions. B2B SaaS, professional services, and considered-purchase e-commerce see this most clearly right now.

You're not a good fit yet, and we'll say so before taking the engagement, in three situations. You have no existing content or site to restructure and no budget to produce new content, since AEO amplifies an existing foundation rather than replacing the need for one. Your category has essentially no AI-search query volume yet, in which case the effort is premature. Or you're expecting a specific citation count or ranking guarantee, which nobody can honestly promise in a system this new. In any of those cases, the honest answer is not yet, or not this specific service — sometimes traditional SEO or core content work needs to come first.

**A note on llms.txt, since it gets oversold**

llms.txt is a proposed standard for giving AI crawlers a clean, curated map of your site. We implement it as basic hygiene because it costs little and may matter more later. What we won't tell you is that it will improve your citations today. As of 2026, no major AI provider — OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, or Meta — has publicly confirmed using it as a ranking or retrieval signal, adoption sits at roughly one in ten sites, and Google has said directly that it has no effect on Search or AI Overviews. Anyone selling it to you as a major AEO lever isn't being straight with you.

Asked and answered

Common Questions

  • ThinkMedia charges a flat monthly fee, not tied to ad spend, starting for companies spending $5,000 or more a month on marketing overall. Pricing is scoped after the baseline audit, since the amount of content needing restructuring varies enormously by site size.

  • The baseline audit is ready within two weeks. Citation improvements typically take 60 to 90 days to show up, since AI platforms re-crawl and re-evaluate sources on their own schedule, not on request.

  • You keep full ownership of your AEO tracking and data at all times. Baseline data, tracked prompt history, and every piece of restructured content live under your business's own accounts from day one. If you leave, you leave with all of it.

  • ThinkMedia has no minimum contract length. Thirty days' notice ends the engagement in either direction, with no annual minimum — especially important in a discipline this new, where committing to a full year upfront would be a bad deal for you.

  • Nobody can honestly guarantee a specific citation count or ranking position inside a model's generated answer, and any agency that promises one isn't being straight with you. What ThinkMedia provides instead is a clear baseline, a defensible strategy, and monthly progress reported against both.

  • AEO is not replacing SEO. The two share technical foundations — crawlability, authority, page structure — but SEO earns a ranking position and AEO earns a citation inside a generated answer. Most companies need both running together, not one instead of the other.

  • ThinkMedia adds llms.txt as low-cost hygiene, but doesn't expect it to move citations. No major AI provider has confirmed using llms.txt as a retrieval signal as of 2026, and adoption sits around one in ten sites. Treat it as future-proofing, not a growth lever.

  • A named strategist assigned at kickoff, the same person on every call and every report — not a junior coordinator relaying updates from a content team you never speak with.

  • Most are relabeling standard SEO work. We report citation and mention rates against a real baseline, invest in third-party sources since most AI mentions come from outside your own site, and tell you plainly what doesn't work yet instead of selling every new tactic as essential.

Proof

Results.

Every case study

Get in touch

Tell us what you’re running.

  1. You name the questions

    The five your buyers ask before they shortlist anyone.

  2. We run your AI visibility check

    Each question through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews. Named, cited, or absent — and who appears instead.

  3. You get the baseline

    Your citation rate against your top three competitors. Most companies have never seen this.

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