What is AEO? Answer engine optimization explained for B2B in 2026
German buyers are asking AI systems who to trust. Here’s the discipline that decides whether your company is the answer—or a competitor is.
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Field notes on SEO, AEO, and GEO from the Digital Domination team.
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Three Google spam updates in one year: what the 2026 pattern reveals about thin content—and AI citability
March, June, August. Three confirmed rollouts, one content floor. And it’s the same floor the LLMs use to decide what to cite.
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Perplexity cites your brand 46× more often than ChatGPT—here’s what your AEO strategy is missing
The two engines run on different citation economics. Optimizing for one and calling it done is a budget mistake, not a shortcut.
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Does structured data help AI Overviews? Google says no—Perplexity’s evidence says otherwise
Both statements are true at the same time. Here’s the mechanism that reconciles them, and a per-engine decision matrix you can hand to a client.
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GEO tools 2026: how to measure your brand’s citation share in AI answers
Rank trackers measure a results page your buyers are abandoning. Here are the five tools, three KPIs, and one free method that measure what AI actually says about you.
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Not AI Mode. Every Search: What Gemini Flash’s Global Default Means for B2B Content Strategy
AI Mode is a layout. Gemini Flash is the engine scoring your pages underneath it—regardless of what your users see on the SERP.
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Cloudflare’s AI bot split could break your Google indexing—audit this before September 2026
Cloudflare now sorts crawlers into Search, Agent, and Training. Googlebot sits in the mixed-purpose middle—and a single WAF rule can drop it at the network layer without a peep in Search Console.
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GEO research quantified: how quotes, statistics, and source links lift AI citation rates
Three editorial changes, one peer-reviewed study, and a realistic refresh cadence for B2B teams that don’t have a newsroom.
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llms.txt: the spec-compliant format guide for SMBs (step-by-step)
How to build an llms.txt file AI crawlers can actually navigate—and why a file full of marketing prose is worse than not having one at all.
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After Google’s AI guide: is GEO still a discipline—or just good SEO?
Google says optimizing for AI is “still SEO.” The citation data, the platform gaps, and the audit scores I keep seeing say the story isn’t that clean.
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Why AI chatbots can’t find your company—and how Organization schema fixes it
If ChatGPT and Perplexity won’t recommend you, the problem usually isn’t your content. It’s that the machine can’t tell who you are.
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265 million missing clicks: what DACH B2B companies must measure instead of SEO rankings in 2026
Your rank tracker is green, your GA4 is red, and the gap has a name. Here’s the number that explains it—and the four-layer stack that replaces position tracking as your primary KPI.
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Training bot vs. search bot: configure robots.txt to block AI training without losing citation visibility
Cloudflare’s new default block frames the choice as all-or-nothing. It isn’t. Here’s the surgical split that protects your content and keeps you citable in ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.
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GSC’s new Generative AI report doesn’t track CTR—here is your new KPI for AI search visibility
Google just shipped a native instrument for AI impression data. It deliberately leaves out clicks—and that omission tells you exactly which metric to put on your dashboard.
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FAQ rich results are dead—here’s the schema stack that still gets you cited by AI in 2026
Google killed the display feature, not the data. The B2B sites stripping FAQPage right now are deleting the one signal AI engines still read.
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How LLMs decide which sources to cite
What ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity actually read from a site — and why clean schema.org annotations move the needle more than a third hero slider.
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The 2026 AI crawler roster: GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, OAI-AdsBot—which one actually sends traffic?
Four bots crawl your site every day. Only one of them sends visitors back. Here’s the data, the decision matrix, and the robots.txt snippets I use on every audit.
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Ranking #1 no longer guarantees AI citations: the 2026 citation gap every B2B team must understand
You can own the top blue link for your core term and still be invisible when your buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Mode who to hire. Here’s why—and what actually drives citation now.