In October 2025 we published a piece titled "AEO: the new frontier of visibility Google doesn't want you to know about". I opened with a data point: 58.5% of searches ended without a click.
That piece became the most-read of the year on our blog. For two reasons:
The first is that we'd called it right. AEO — Answer Engine Optimization, the art of getting cited by LLM-based answer engines — was really becoming the new game of organic visibility. Those who noticed it immediately began building advantage a year ago.
The second is that, while writing it, we didn't yet know how many things we would understand backwards in the seven months that followed.
This is the honest post-mortem: what aged well, what aged badly, what's already to throw away. In order.
What worked a year ago (and still works)
Let's start with the good news. Three indications we gave in October 2025 hold up well in May 2026.
Pages structured as "list of questions with answers below" are still gold. They were for the old SEO (featured snippets) and they are for the new (chat citation). What's changed is the entry volume: LLMs love this structure because it's exactly how they reason internally — question → atomic answer → source. Keep writing real FAQs, long, with a self-sufficient answer of 2-3 paragraphs.
Entities matter more than keywords. We already said this. Today it's crystal clear: LLMs don't search for "phrases", they search for connections between concepts. If your page on Collio wine also mentions "Friuli", "ribolla gialla", "Slow Food", "steel-tank vinification", you're inside the semantic network of the category. If it doesn't appear, you're invisible even if the keyword is repeated ten times.
Inbound links from sources that LLMs "read often" are worth what links from Wikipedia were once worth. Reddit, Quora (the parts that survived), stable thematic communities, sector blogs with few but loyal readers, podcasts with public transcripts. SEO link-building for the next 18 months looks very much like digital PR from 2015. Focus on the 30 sources that count in your sector. Forget the 300 where nobody listens.
What aged badly
Here things start to hurt.
"Optimize for Perplexity!" was useless advice. We gave it too. The truth is that Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Mistral all have different strategies for crawling, citation, and ranking. Optimizing for one doesn't help on another. And every two months someone changes algorithm, indexing scope, or inline citation schema.
What we've understood is that you don't optimize for an engine. You optimize to be the best answer. Period. The technical nuances weigh much less than the toolmakers led us to believe. Those who sold "AEO Audit Tool" targeted at Perplexity sold smoke.
Schema markup is less powerful than we thought. Adding FAQPage, HowTo, Article with all fields remains useful, but the delta of citations it produces is low. LLMs don't read schema. They read text. Schema helped (and helps) the Google SERP. For AEO, real content matters, not hyperstructuring. Save dev hours to write better.
"AEO metrics" are still a mess. A year ago we hoped that by spring 2026 we'd have a Search Console version for AEO — impressions, click-through, average positions in AI responses. Spoiler: nope. There are third-party dashboards that try to monitor what percentage of prompts you appear in, but they're all estimates, with different methodologies, and numbers that vary by 200% between tools. If anyone sells you an AEO report with two decimal places, take two steps back.
What's already to throw away
Just one thing, but it weighs.
"Write content designed to be CITED" — we said it again and again, but with a nuance that today needs complete revision.
For months we recommended a very specific format: short paragraphs, self-sufficient sentences, numerical claims clearly stated, citation of authoritative sources inline. The logic was: if the LLM finds a perfect bite, it takes it and cites you.
It worked. For about nine months.
Then something happened: every SEO on the planet started writing this way. The public web filled up with identical "bites" — 50-word paragraphs, percentage data, source in parentheses. Result: LLMs started to distrust this aesthetic, because it signaled optimized content, therefore often empty. The signal is inverted: today pages that look too much like the "perfect AEO format" perform less than pages written like a normal article, well-structured, with a human introductory paragraph and reasoning that unfolds.
It's the usual story. SEO 2010: keyword stuffing → penalized. SEO 2015: H1 obligatory + meta keyword → devalued. AEO 2024–2025: atomic paragraphs with citation → devalued. Every two or three years the system rewards content that doesn't look optimized, because everyone else is optimizing the same way.
The new pragmatic rule: write content that an industry expert would gladly read like an email from a colleague. No more "high-information-density sentences". No more forced "TL;DR". Long pieces with a real voice are back, built to be read, not parsed. The engines understand — because the models have improved to the point of reading the way we do.
A new thing we didn't know in October
There's also a phenomenon that was marginal in October 2025 and is central today: the second-hand citation.
It works like this. You publish a piece. The piece is read by a human who works at Wired, at Il Post, at a serious Italian sector blog, at a niche newsletter. That human writes something based on your piece, and cites you. From that moment, the LLM cites the secondary source (Wired, Il Post, the newsletter), not you. Your content is the seed. But your brand doesn't appear.
This radically changes the AEO economy. For a year we thought being well-indexed by LLMs was enough. In reality it's better to be well-cited by those who are well-cited.
Translated into Italian: digital PR toward vertical media — those 30 names mentioned above — is the real AEO channel of 2026. The articles on your blog aren't enough. You need articles on your blog that become the source of other articles. It's a longer loop. It's what really works.
The honest point: we're building tools to measure better
Editorial confession. While writing this piece we realized that, talking about AEO as consultants, we were forced to use the same tools we were criticizing. So we started building one ourselves, inside OpificioAI: a system that runs standardized batteries of prompts on the main AI platforms and monitors over time whether and how a brand is cited — with transparent methodology, no magic.
We're using it internally on clients who ask for it and on Tuken (the first product that will soon need to answer the question "does ChatGPT know me?"). We'll talk about it again when it's ready to be used also by those who aren't clients.
The operational rule, seven months later
If we had to distill what we've learned in a single line, it would be this:
AEO isn't a new discipline. It's journalism applied to SEO.
Write well. Build authoritative sources around you. Measure what you can (and distrust those who measure everything). Update pieces that work, not those that don't. Stop chasing the trend of "LLM-optimized formats" and return to reasoning.
In seven months we'll revisit even this. There are things today that seem like the rule that by Christmas will be superseded. What we can promise is: we'll tell you.
Thursday, May 28, we'll write about the four most recurring mistakes we see when a company puts an AI agent into production. Four mistakes we made too, on Tuken and on BP. Four you can avoid right away if you start now.
Want to find out if ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini are already talking about you? We work on sustainable organic growth strategies between classic SEO and AEO. Write to us and we'll do a free AI citation audit on your brand.