We ran our own AEO playbook on ourselves. Here are the receipts.
Most agencies that sell answer engine optimization cannot show you their own results. We decided to fix that by pointing the playbook at ourselves and measuring every number. In one quarter, LoudFace went from appearing in 0.18% of the AI answers in our category to 10.35%. Brand mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews rose from 8 to 1,184 in a 30-day window, and when we get cited we now land at an average position of 2.9, inside the top three. This is the full story, including the parts that flatter us less.
Full disclosure: LoudFace published this and we are not a neutral source. We run AEO for a living, so "AEO works" is convenient for us to say. That is exactly why we are putting the actual dashboard on the table instead of arguing it. Numbers you can hold us to beat adjectives.
The receipts, in one table
These are our own share of answer figures, pulled from the same AI-citation tracking we run for clients. The window is April through June 2026.
| Metric | April (start) | June (now) | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Share of our category's AI answers | 0.18% | 10.35% | up |
| Brand mentions across AI engines (30 days) | 8 | 1,184 | up |
| Average position when cited | not ranked | 2.9 (top 3) | up |
| AI-referred share of site pageviews | negligible | 4.75% | rising |
Two honest notes before anyone gets excited about the multiples. We started near zero, so going from 0.18% to 10.35% is a real climb but the "57 times" framing it produces is inflated by a tiny starting base. And this is a single brand, our own, measured over rolling 30-day windows across three engines. Treat it as one strong case, our own, rather than a law of physics. The trajectory is what matters, and the trajectory is steep and steady.
Why we used ourselves as the test case
We could have led with a client. We have the Toku result and others. We chose ourselves for one reason: there is no confidentiality, no rounding, no "results may vary" footnote we control. You can ask any AI engine a question in our category right now and see whether we show up. That is a harder test than a client logo, and it is the one we wanted to pass.
It also kept us honest about timeline. We watched the invisible quarter happen to our own brand: April produced almost nothing, and if we had judged the program on month one we would have killed it. The payoff arrived in months two and three.
The starting line: 0.18%
In April, when we began tracking, LoudFace appeared in 8 AI answers across a month of monitored conversations in our category. That is 0.18% share of answer. For practical purposes we were invisible. Competitors with a decade of domain authority owned the answers, and an AI engine asked "best B2B SaaS AEO agency" had no reason to name us.
That starting point matters because it is where most B2B SaaS brands sit today. If you have never structured a page for AI extraction, you are probably near zero too, and you cannot see it until you measure it.
What we actually changed
Here is the playbook, the same one we run for clients. None of it is secret, because the work is the moat, not the method.
We published answer-shaped content, not keyword-shaped content. Every cornerstone piece opens with a 40 to 60 word direct answer that an engine can lift whole, uses question-shaped section headings, and ends with a structured FAQ. AI engines quote extractable text. They skip walls of prose.
We concentrated instead of fragmenting. Early on we had near-duplicate pages competing for the same answer and splitting our citations. We consolidated the weakest into canonical pages so the authority pooled in one place rather than scattering across five.
We claimed the questions nobody owned. We found buyer prompts in our category where every competitor scored zero, generative-engine and answer-engine agency questions that were wide open, and published the definitive page for each before the field noticed.
We grounded every claim in first-party data. Our AI-citation benchmark and pieces like this one give engines something specific to quote. A page with a real number gets cited more than a page with a confident opinion.
We shipped schema that machines read. FAQPage, Article, breadcrumb, and structured listings on every relevant page, because an engine that can parse your page cleanly is an engine that can quote it.
That is the whole recipe. The hard part is doing it every week without quitting in the invisible quarter.
The curve: 8 to 1,184
By May, mentions climbed to 330 and share of answer hit 3.56%. By June, mentions reached 1,184 and share of answer crossed 10%. The growth was not linear. It compounded, because each cited page made the next one easier to cite as the brand became a known entity in the category.
The position number is the one we are proudest of. When AI engines cite LoudFace now, we land at an average position of 2.9, which is higher than several competitors with two to three times our domain authority. That is the core finding of AEO: in AI answers, being structured for extraction beats being old and big. A well-built page from a smaller brand out-cites a famous one that buried its answer in a brochure.
Where the answers come from
The growth is not evenly spread, and the uneven part is the actionable part. Across the three engines we track, our visibility on Google AI Overviews runs more than double our visibility on ChatGPT. ChatGPT is our weakest engine.
That matters because of what we found in our own traffic data, below. ChatGPT is also the engine that sends us the most actual humans. The engine where we have the most room to grow is the engine that converts best, which is precisely where we are pointing the next quarter of work.
The signal that made us care: AI referrals
Share of answer is a leading indicator. The lagging indicator, the one that pays rent, is humans arriving on the site from an AI engine. So we instrumented it.
In the last 28 days, 4.75% of our site pageviews came from people clicking through from an AI engine, and that number has roughly quadrupled over the quarter, from a handful of weekly visits in the spring to the high teens and twenties per week in June. ChatGPT alone drives about 72% of it.
Two caveats keep us honest. The absolute numbers are still small, because our total traffic is modest. And 4.75% is a floor rather than a ceiling: many AI tools, including the ChatGPT desktop app, strip the referrer, so a chunk of our "direct" traffic is almost certainly AI-referred and uncounted. The real figure is higher than we can prove. The direction is unambiguous: AI search is now a measurable, growing source of real visitors, while our classic Google clicks declined over the same window.
What this means for your AEO program
If you are deciding whether AEO is worth it, here is the honest read from our own data.
It works, and it compounds, but it does not pay in month one. The brands that win are the ones still publishing in month three. If your leadership judges the program on the invisible quarter, you will quit right before the curve turns up. We almost did, and we run this for a living.
Domain authority is not the gate people think it is. We out-position bigger competitors in AI answers because our pages are built to be quoted. You do not need to be the biggest brand to be the cited one.
And you cannot manage what you do not measure. We only know any of this because we track share of answer and AI referrals as first-class metrics. Most companies are flying blind on the channel that is quietly replacing the search bar.
See your own number
The single most useful thing you can do this week is find out where you actually stand. Run a free AI search visibility audit and you will see your share of answer across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, the same baseline we started from at 0.18%. It takes about fifteen minutes and there is no pitch attached.
If the number is low, that is the opportunity. It is not a verdict. We were at 0.18% in April. If you want help closing the gap, here is what a program costs, starting at $5,000 a month, and how we run it.
Limitations, stated plainly
We would discount this piece if someone else published it without these caveats, so here they are. The sample is a single brand, our own, in the B2B SaaS agency category. The window is rolling 30-day periods from April to June 2026, which is short. Our citation tracking covers three engines, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, rather than every AI surface. The percentage growth looks enormous partly because the starting base was almost zero. And we have not isolated AEO from every other thing we did in the quarter, so treat this as strong directional evidence from a motivated source, checked against numbers you can verify yourself, rather than a controlled experiment. For how citation timelines tend to behave more generally, we wrote up the three speeds of AI citation separately.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does AEO actually work?
For our own brand, yes, measurably. We went from 0.18% to 10.35% share of our category's AI answers in one quarter, with brand mentions rising from 8 to 1,184 in a 30-day window. The honest caveat is that it compounds rather than spiking, and the first month produced almost nothing. AEO works for brands that publish extractable, well-structured content consistently and measure the result. It does not work for brands expecting an instant lift.
Is AEO worth it for B2B SaaS?
It is worth it if your buyers are starting their research in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews, which most B2B SaaS buyers now are. The payoff shows up as share of answer first and as referred traffic and pipeline later. In our case AI referrals reached 4.75% of pageviews and are still rising while classic Google clicks fell, so the channel mix is shifting whether or not you invest in it.
How long does AEO take to show results?
In our data the first month was nearly flat, real movement started in month two, and share of answer crossed 10% by month three. Some individual citations appear within days when a page is well structured, but building a durable share of answer is a multi-month effort. We break the timeline down further in our piece on how long AI citations take.
How do you measure AEO results?
Two metrics. Share of answer is the percentage of AI responses in your category that mention your brand, which is the leading indicator. AI-referred traffic, the humans who click through from an AI engine to your site, is the lagging indicator that ties to revenue. We track both; most companies track neither, which is why the channel feels invisible.
Do you need high domain authority to win AI citations?
No. We out-position competitors with two to three times our domain authority because our pages are structured for extraction. In AI answers, a clean, well-organized, data-backed page from a smaller brand frequently beats an older, bigger competitor whose answer is buried. Authority helps, but structure and specificity decide more than people expect.
How do I run an AEO audit on my own site?
The fastest path is a free AI search visibility audit, which shows your current share of answer across the major engines in about fifteen minutes. From there the work is structuring your highest-intent pages for extraction, grounding them in first-party data, and publishing consistently enough to get through the first quiet month. You can start with the audit and decide from there.
