The SaaS guide to building an AEO strategy

Five things every plan needs, and the order to do them in. Put together by Ané Wiese, Performance Marketing Lead.

Most SaaS teams treat AEO as a monitoring exercise. Plug in an AI search tracker, watch how often the brand comes up, report the number each month. That is worth doing, but it only measures the output. Real optimization means structuring your content, your technical setup and your off-page authority so that answer engines pick you as the source of truth.

Multi-search is not a prediction anymore. The gap is not awareness, it is that almost nobody has a plan built around their own audience and product. Here is what that plan needs. You will want an AI rank tracker for the final step, and Keyword.com, Peec AI, Otterly and Profound all do the job.

1. Map the engines your buyers actually use

• Adoption varies sharply by plan type, region and technical expertise. Claude and Mistral are currently strong in France, while ChatGPT dominates in Germany.
• Products built for developers should prioritise tools like Claude Code or GitHub Copilot well ahead of general consumer engines.
• Each engine rewards something different. Gemini runs on Google Search and the Knowledge Graph, so schema markup and entity authority matter. ChatGPT pulls from a hybrid index and builds on consensus, which puts the weight on third-party reviews and off-page mentions. Perplexity favours recency and sources it can cite cleanly. Claude rewards well-structured long-form content, and Claude Code reads developer documentation directly.
• To confirm which web index an engine really uses, read the third-party data processors named in its policies rather than trusting the public documentation.

2. Optimize for the search index behind the engine

• Answer engines do not crawl the live web to respond to a prompt. They retrieve from a traditional search index first, so that index is what you are really optimizing for.
• Google Search feeds Gemini, and rewards topical authority, information gain and user signals.
• Brave Search feeds Perplexity, Claude and Mistral. It leans on traditional technical SEO, particularly Core Web Vitals and backlinks, and places little to no weight on Google’s topical authority metrics.
• If you want visibility in Perplexity or Claude, Google Search Console data alone will not tell you whether you are winning.

3. Publish beyond your own blog

• Review the SERPs of the search engines feeding these platforms and the same pattern repeats: community and video content is heavily favoured.
• Reddit engagement, third-party review sites such as G2 and Capterra, and YouTube all feed the consensus these engines look for. To be cited, you have to exist where they go looking.
• This is no longer a nice addition to a content plan. It is a foundational requirement for AEO.

4. Let the right crawlers in

• You cannot be cited if you cannot be crawled. Cloudflare settings, server rules and robots.txt all need to explicitly allow the user agents of the engines you care about.
• The list to verify with your technical team: Googlebot and Google-Extended, OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User, MistralAI-Index and MistralAI-User.
• Claude Code is the exception. It fetches pages directly from the developer’s own machine, so your developer documentation has to be clean, static Markdown for it to be parsed.

5. Measure inputs as well as outputs

• Input tracking. Monitor server logs to confirm the bots above are actually crawling your key pages. Peec AI can handle this now. Alongside that, track your traditional rankings in the specific engines that feed your priority platforms: Bing, Brave and Google.
• Output tracking. Use prompt tracking platforms to see how often your brand is recommended for bottom-of-the-funnel queries such as “best CRM for enterprise”, then read the sentiment and context of those citations and feed what you find back into the content plan.

Where to start

Crawler access first. It is often a one afternoon fix, and nothing downstream works until the engines can reach your pages. Then the engine shortlist, and the rank tracking in whichever indexes sit behind those engines. Off-page consensus last, because community, review and video presence takes the longest to compound and needs a named owner to survive past month one.

AI rank trackers tell you the score. The five steps above are how you change it. Start with crawler access, because none of the rest works until the engines can reach you.