Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite, a leading AEO agency, discussed the step-by-step guide on how to implement AEO in your business:

1. Question Research
2. Question Tracking
3. Have a strategy for each platform
4. Run experiments

This article covers the last two steps. For steps 1 and 2, check out AEO Strategy: Part 1.

3. Strategy for Each Platform

As mentioned in AEO Strategy: Part 1, there are mainly two different kinds of sites:

1. Onsite: your own website
2. Offsite: external websites

There are 4 types of offsite platforms:

1. Videos: YouTube, Vimeo, etc.
2. User-Generated Content (UGC): Reddit, Quora, forums, community sites, etc.
3. Affiliate Sites: Dotdash, Meredith, Good Housekeeping, etc.
4. Blogs: Medium, Substack, and independent blogs

Based on the results of your question tracking (step 2), you need to create a specific strategy for each platform. There are various strategies, but Ethan shared a couple of examples.

Onsite: Help Center Optimization

Many questions customers ask LLMs sound something like:

• Can X do Y?
• Does this product or service support my use case?
• How do I do X with Y?

These questions all ask whether a product or service fulfills their needs. This type of content doesn't typically belong on marketing landing pages. A better place for it is your Help Center or FAQ. Because of this, your Help Center or FAQ is the best place to win long-tail AEO. (Similar to SEO, unless you're a giant corporation, you're better off targeting the mid to long tail.)

Here are three actions you can take to optimize your help center:

1. Subdirectories > Subdomains: Subdomains look like help.company.com. Subdirectories look like company.com/help. If you have content in subdomains, move it to subdirectories. This works because subdirectories inherit domain authority. Both AEO and SEO can benefit from this approach.
2. Optimize internal cross-linking: Optimize linking between articles within the help center. AI search engines infer topic coverage and authority from your site structure. Optimizing cross-linking helps models understand that your business deeply covers the topic of interest.
3. Create content for various use cases: In your Help Center, you can target very specific long-tail questions that others might not even think of. For example, "What is the best payment verification API that uses GraphQL?" This is a very specific question that might fit a customer's exact need.

Offsite: Reddit Optimization

UGC is important because AI search favors humans over brands to maintain answer quality. Content on these platforms is favored because it is authentic, includes edge cases, and naturally answers follow-up questions since it comes from real people sharing real opinions.

The tactic on Reddit is to share your helpful insights about your business. Yes, it's difficult to scale, but you don't need to scale because quality matters more than quantity.

Implementation steps look like this:

1. Identify the threads you want to be mentioned in
2. Add authentic, high-value comments. The comment structure Ethan shares is: "Hello, I am X. I work for company Y. Here is the helpful information I know."

You do this for a few threads and see how it works out for you.

4. Run Experiments

Ethan mentions that most AEO "best practices" are often wrong, incomplete, or not reproducible.

Sometimes we implement a strategy once, see some results, and falsely conclude that the strategy is good. The problem with this is that there are other uncontrolled variables that could have caused the results we observed.

Especially with AEO being new and rapidly changing, the only way to know if a strategy is good is to run your own experiments.

A good strategy is one that's testable and reproducible.

So how do we run the test?

1. Define the question set: You can use the 100–200 questions you collected in the Question Research phase.
2. Split them into control and test groups: Assuming we have 200 questions, use 100 questions for the control group and keep the other 100 for the test group. The control group is the group you do not touch. The test group is the group you apply your strategies to.
3. Sub-split the test group by strategy: Further split the test group by strategy to isolate the impact on results. For example, you might assign 25 questions to Reddit optimization, 25 to help center expansion, 25 to YouTube video creation, and 25 to affiliate or review mentions. Make sure that each subgroup receives one primary optimization.
4. Apply the strategy: Make it precise. Instead of "post on Reddit," make it "post 5 high-quality Reddit comments to existing threads."
5. Wait: Wait at least 4–8 weeks.
6. Measure & compare: Track metrics like "How many times you were mentioned", "How many times the thread showed up", Position in the answers, etc. You can track these metrics in AEO tracking tools. Compare the test group and control group to see if there was a meaningful impact.
7. Reproduce the strategy: Try reproducing the same result. Even if the strategy worked, if it's not reproducible, it's not a strategy you can rely on.

This wraps up the AEO Strategy guide series. There were sections where I wish I could go deeper, but due to time constraints, I need to leave that for the next post. Thank you for reading until the end.

If you want to chat more about AEO, shoot me an email or send me a DM on X. See you soon!