You don't need enterprise-level software to do this. We use Peec AI because it's a lot more affordable. You could also spend some time doing it manually, but it depends how much your time is worth. Most of the really expensive AI tracking tools are built for large marketing teams that need advanced reporting. For a smaller SaaS, something simpler is usually enough.

You're mostly right - most of what's sold as AEO is SEO with a new label, and anyone pitching it as a wholly separate discipline is repositioning. But there's a real slice (\~20%) that genuinely doesn't overlap, and it's the part that decides whether an LLM cites you. The genuinely distinct tactics - things that move AI citation but not necessarily your Google rank: \- Off-site entity/brand presence. LLMs synthesize from many sources, not just your page. Being mentioned, compared, and described \*consistently\* across third-party pages (listicles, review sites, Reddit, Wikipedia/Wikidata, industry roundups) makes a model more likely to name you. I'm specifically talking about unlinked brand presence. \- Getting into the sources the AI actually pulls. AI Overviews and Perplexity cite a rotating set of pages that often are NOT the #1 organic result. Landing in the top "best X for Y" comparison articles you don't own can get your brand cited even when your own page ranks #8. \- Passage-level answer structure. Not schema (that's shared with SEO) but writing each section so a single self-contained paragraph answers one question with the entity named - because models extract passages, not whole pages. You can rank well and still be un-quotable because your answer is spread across five paragraphs. I wouldn't say this is much different from traditional SEO, but it's definitely not the same. \- Factual consistency across your own pages. Contradicting yourself (different pricing/feature lists on different pages) makes models distrust and omit you. On measurement - the part most AEO sellers go quiet on: \- There's no official citation rank tracker, but you can run a fixed set of buyer prompts across ChatGPT/Perplexity/Gemini on a schedule and log whether you're mentioned, in what position, and with what framing. That's exactly what the "AI visibility" tool...