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Your Customers Are Asking AI Who to Buy From. Here's How to Make Sure It Says You. | Sourceable Blog
AEO Insights
Sourceable
Sourceable
·September 1, 2026·7 min read

Your Customers Are Asking AI Who to Buy From. Here's How to Make Sure It Says You.

A complete guide to Answer Engine Optimization — and the 8 jobs every brand now has to do to stay visible.

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ChatGPT
Gemini
Claude
Perplexity
Your Customers Are Asking AI Who to Buy From. Here's How to Make Sure It Says You.

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1. Check what AI actually says about you — every day2. See exactly who's getting recommended instead of you3. Find the pages that are quietly going stale4. Find the pages AI literally cannot read5. Find where you should be mentioned — but aren't6. Turn all of it into a report you'll actually read7. Publish the content that gets you cited — without a new hire

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8. Prove it's actually working
The shift is already happening. The only question is whether you can see it.

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Right now, someone in your market is typing a question into ChatGPT.

"What's the best [your category] tool?" "Who should I hire for [your service]?" "Which [your product] is most reliable?"

They're not opening ten blue links anymore. They're reading one answer — and acting on it. 40% of Gen Z already prefers ChatGPT to Google. Your buyers have quietly moved from searching to asking.

And here's the uncomfortable part: you have no idea what the AI is telling them about you.

You track your Google rankings. Your ad spend. Your social engagement. But there's now an entire layer of buying decisions happening inside AI answers — and it's completely invisible to your dashboards. If ChatGPT recommends three competitors and never mentions you, nothing in your analytics will ever tell you. No click. No visit. No trace. Just a customer who never knew you existed.

This is the new discipline: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). Traditional SEO gets you ranked in a list of results. AEO gets you named, cited, and recommended inside the AI's answer itself.

The problem is that "doing AEO" isn't one task. It's at least eight. Below is exactly what a complete AEO system looks like — and how Sourceable does all eight for you.


1. Check what AI actually says about you — every day

You can't fix what you can't see. The foundation of AEO is knowing, on any given day, whether AI names you.

Sourceable takes the questions your buyers actually ask and runs them against ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity on a schedule — daily, weekly, or on your own cron. For every answer, it tells you: were you mentioned? Where in the answer? How prominently? First, or buried at the bottom?

That rolls up into a single AI Visibility score (0–100) with a trend line, so you can watch it move week over week — the same way you'd watch a Google ranking, but for the place your buyers now actually look.

This is your answer to "Am I in the room when AI makes recommendations?"


2. See exactly who's getting recommended instead of you

Being invisible is bad. Being invisible while your competitor is the AI's favorite is worse.

Sourceable's Share of Voice and Competitor tracking shows you who gets named when you don't — and by how much. You get a live Market Position map (your visibility vs. your share of voice, plotted against every competitor), your exact rank, the gap to the brand just ahead of you, and the gap to the leader.

You can even run a head-to-head comparison against a single rival over time, and see which sources the AI used to find them — so you know exactly what you're up against.

This turns "we think we're losing" into "here's the brand beating us, here's the gap, here's why."


3. Find the pages that are quietly going stale

Here's a stat that surprises most marketing teams: 73% of AI citations come from pages published in the last 90 days. AI models heavily favor fresh content.

That means your best-performing page from two years ago may be silently aging out of AI answers. Sourceable's Action Center flags the pages that are getting old and losing citation power — and tells you which ones to refresh first, ranked by predicted impact.

Freshness isn't vanity. It's one of the biggest levers in whether AI cites you at all.


4. Find the pages AI literally cannot read

Another one that catches teams off guard: roughly 69% of AI crawlers can't execute JavaScript. If your key pages render their content client-side — or if your robots.txt is quietly blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot — the AI never sees a word of it. You could have the best content in your category and still be invisible.

Sourceable checks this two ways:

  • The Action Center surfaces concrete fixes like "Unblock GPTBot in robots.txt" — with the root cause, why it matters, and the expected outcome ("Enables ChatGPT to read and cite your content").

  • The free AI Robots.txt Checker and AI Agent Readiness Checker grade your site on crawler access, structured data, llms.txt, and more — so you can find and fix the technical blockers before they cost you citations.

The cheapest AEO win is usually just letting the robots in.


5. Find where you should be mentioned — but aren't

Most brands assume AEO is about their own website. It isn't. Around 82% of the sources AI quotes are pages you don't own — the "best X tools" roundups, comparison lists, industry blogs, and podcasts that AI treats as trusted third-party evidence.

Sourceable's Citations view shows you exactly which domains AI pulls from when it talks about your category — with each source's authority score, domain rating, and type. That's your target list: the roundups and mentions worth earning, because those are the pages actually feeding the AI's answer.

You don't just optimize your site. You optimize the internet's opinion of you.


6. Turn all of it into a report you'll actually read

Data you have to dig for is data you ignore. Sourceable rolls everything — visibility, share of voice, sentiment, citations, platform-by-platform performance — into a clean Overview dashboard and daily reports with clear next steps, not just numbers.

You get per-platform breakdowns (are you strong on Perplexity but invisible on ChatGPT?), sentiment analysis (is AI describing you as "innovative and reliable" or "expensive and complex"?), and an overall AEO Score with a breakdown across visibility, prominence, sentiment, and citations.

One glance tells you where you stand and what to do next.


7. Publish the content that gets you cited — without a new hire

Finding gaps is half the job. Filling them is the other half. Sourceable includes a built-in content and blog engine: draft, schedule, and publish AEO-optimized posts — with an RSS feed AI crawlers love — directly from the same platform that told you what to write.

That closes the loop most tools leave open: see the gap → create the content → watch your visibility climb.

A marketing hire to own this kind of work runs $150K+ a year. Most teams don't need another hire — they need this done.


8. Prove it's actually working

This is the part almost nobody does — and the part that makes AEO defensible to your CEO. When you resolve an action in Sourceable, it snapshots your scores. Later, its Impact Tracker compares the predicted impact vs. the actual measured impact and gives each fix a verdict: overperformed, as expected, or underperformed.

Layered on top is an Action Center Health Score (0–100) that tracks how many issues you've resolved, your resolution trend, and whether you're closing the critical ones — so improvement is a number that goes up, not a vibe.

You don't just do AEO. You prove the ROI of every fix.


The shift is already happening. The only question is whether you can see it.

Every one of these eight jobs is happening whether you track it or not. AI is already answering questions about your category, already recommending brands, already deciding who gets the deal — thousands of times a day, invisibly.

You can keep flying blind. Or you can see exactly how AI sees your brand, find the gaps, fix them, and become the name AI recommends.

That's what Sourceable does — all eight jobs, in one platform.

👉 Get your free AI visibility report and see how AI sees your brand in 60 seconds — besourceable.com

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