u/Darkeur012

I've been trying to build awareness around AEO in my market for a while now and it's slow going. Put out YouTube videos, blog articles, LinkedIn posts, but the audience mostly doesn't engage. It feels like I'm explaining a problem they don't know they have yet.

I even keep it really simple on purpose, plain everyday language, but even then it doesn't click... That's the part I'm stuck on. It's an early topic, so there's real education to do before anyone even considers the service. But educating a market that isn't searching for the thing is genuinely hard. The classic create the demand problem.

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about closing deals here, more the top of funnel awareness piece.

So for those of you doing AEO, how are you actually educating your market? Which formats or angles got people to care about something they weren't looking for? Is it still video and LinkedIn for you, or did something else click, like communities, newsletters, talks, whatever worked? Or do you think the market just isn't ready and you'd rather wait for it to mature?

Most AEO content recycles the same advice. Some of it is legit: direct answer at the top of the page, short snippet-ready paragraphs, FAQs on questions people actually ask. Some of it is theater, llms.txt being the poster child, sold as THE magic file when to this day almost no model demonstrably consumes it. But even the good advice on that list has a ceiling: it's a prerequisite, not a differentiator. I've seen technically flawless pages never get cited, and average pages get cited constantly. The difference sits somewhere else.

Here's the breakdown. Lever 1 makes you eligible. The other five are the actual game, and they're all facets of the same thing: becoming an entity the model recognizes in your niche.

1. Technical readability. An LLM bot is blind, it reads your code, not your design. Short sentences, clean HTML, structured data, sourced stats, light code. This makes your page readable and retrievable. It doesn't make it cited. If you're on Webflow, a decent chunk of this lever is handled for you, the generated HTML is clean and semantic out of the box. Which is exactly why technical readability alone won't set you apart: your competitors on the same stack have it too.

2. The humans behind the brand. A model is wary of a faceless brand. About pages with the actual team, author pages linked to real profiles, an active Google Business listing, real-life events relayed on your site. You signal a real entity instead of a ghost site. Heavily underrated.

3. Hyper-specialization. A site that talks about everything is a reference on nothing. Models cite sources they clearly associate with a topic. Being the recognized reference on one precise angle beats being the 50th generalist. This is the keystone, and the slowest to build.

4. Multichannel repurposing. One pillar piece turned into an article, a post, a video, a short. When a model runs into your name across several sources on the same topic, the repetition becomes an authority signal. You're not chasing one perfect page, you're building a consistent, repeated presence.

5. Comparison content. Models pull heavily from listicles and "best X" rankings to answer recommendation queries. Absent from that format, you're invisible across a whole category of prompts. And yes, a lot of those rankings are produced by players who place themselves well, worth knowing when you read them.

6. The sources models weight heavily. Some platforms are overrepresented in what LLMs cite: Reddit, YouTube, niche-specific media. Showing up there with real value often outweighs a classic backlink. Target media in your actual topic, not some off-subject outlet.

The through-line: technical makes you eligible, authority makes you cited. Most people overinvest in lever 1 and skip the other five, when the real game is becoming a recognized entity in your niche.

Curious how people actually working on this see it. Same hierarchy, or would you flip some of the levers?