How are you thinking about AEO for B2B SaaS? We've started seeing a few inbound leads that explicitly found us through ChatGPT, which makes me wonder if this is something worth investing in seriously, or if we're just seeing early noise. For those who've gone deeper: • How did you validate that AEO was actually moving the needle? • What did you focus on first in the short term vs. building for the long term? • What metrics gave you confidence to keep investing? • And what are the biggest mistakes or misconceptions you've seen teams make? Most of the content out there is very tactical ("add schema," "answer FAQs"), but I'm more interested in how people are thinking about AEO as a real acquisition channel. Would love to learn from anyone who's already a few steps ahead.

@Gunjan Saha - sharing a framework from SEJ if it helps plan better

@Srikanth V Would it be possible to share it with me as well?

@Srikanth V with me as well please?

@Srikanth V I’d love to access the framework as well

Hey Gunjan Saha, love this question. AEO is absolutely a real acquisition channel, and it’s definitely not just early noise. Here is how we’ve approached those exact points: • Validation & Tracking (How we validated it was moving the needle): Early on, there weren't many tools tracking brand mentions and citations in AI search. We started completely manually—mapping out our core target queries and checking the visibility of our brand directly within the AI engines. Eventually, specialized tools like Semrush's AI visibility features caught up, allowing us to track things more systematically. • Short-term vs. Long-term (What we focused on first): We focused heavily on strong on-page SEO fundamentals, which paid off massively because the foundations of traditional SEO and AEO/GEO are fundamentally the same. The transition requires keeping your keyword-based foundation but shifting to an entity-first approach. In the long term, nailing your site structure becomes of paramount importance so LLMs can easily crawl and connect the dots. • Core Metrics (What gave us confidence to keep investing): The key indicator for us has been a direct correlation between an increase in our Share of Voice (SOV) across AI engines and a corresponding rise in direct or attributed traffic sessions from those AI search channels. • Biggest Mistakes/Misconceptions: The single biggest mistake is treating AEO as something completely alien or separate from standard SEO. It's an evolution, not a brand-new discipline. If your core technical and content foundations are broken, "tactical fixes" like just slapping on schema won't save you.

are you folks relying on Bing's AI Performance feature or testing in other tools. what other tools? please let me know how are you testing and measuring AI performance.

We aren't relying on Bing webmaster's AI performance. We use Semrush's AI visiblity add-on that gives details on which topic/query we're being cited/mentioned across AI search engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI). However, I've heard about other less expensive tools that offers the same capabilities but haven't tested those.

@Srikanth V Could you also please share it with me? Thanks🙌🏾

@Srikanth V may I also get the framework please? Thank you 🙌

@Srikanth V could you share your framework. Building an automation tool in this space. Thabks