Link building
Answer Engine Optimization
When a buyer asks an AI a question, does it name you? Answer engine optimization tracks that moment, measures your visibility against competitors, and finds the specific pages you can pitch to earn a citation.
- Reading your visibility on daily trainer prompts
- Checking prompt volumes for the topic
- Reading the adidas brand kit and product lines
Across the 14 “best daily trainer” prompts, Nike is named in 88% of answers. adidas is named in 41%. The engines cite Runner’s World and Wirecutter, and you have no page that answers the question.
The topic runs at 5,400 searches a month and is climbing in the assistants. It earns a page of its own.
Your brand kit puts Supernova, not Adizero, in front of everyday runners, so the page leads with the Supernova Rise 3 and keeps Adizero for fast days. Headlines uppercase, adidas lowercase, and the one health claim is the APMA seal it holds. Staged in Documents. Nothing is published.
Run your
Fastest
Everyday.
Thanks to Dreamstrike+ cushioning the Supernova Rise 3 carries the easy miles that make up most of a training week, and keeps Adizero for the days the plan says fast. Nine weeks on our test panel sit behind every pick.
Find your daily trainer
Drafted by your AI Marketer from the Adidas brand kit and product lines. Staged in Documents, not published. Example on the sample account.
Answer engine optimization is the practice of ensuring a business is named and linked when an AI model answers a buying question, by tracking the questions buyers ask, measuring which brands each engine names in its answers, and pitching the specific pages the model read to earn a citation.
What it refuses to do
It will not find you a paid placement
“This reply asks for payment in exchange for a link. I will not write that response.”
It will not say a page is unlinked when it could not read it
“Unchecked: this page returned 403 and was not read.”
It will not send from a domain of ours
“No mailbox connected. Three drafts are ready and none of them has been sent.”
On this page5 sections
What answer engine optimization actually measures
Answer engine optimization measures your brand's presence in the text generated by AI answer engines. This is not about search volume estimates. It is about running your specific prompts and keeping what comes back.
The process is direct. You define the buying questions for your niche. Mentionry asks those questions to the engines on your plan. It captures the result. Every day, you get a record of the answer, the sources the model used, and which competitors were mentioned. Your performance is calculated solely from these captured sessions.
This method reveals two things. First, your true visibility for the questions that matter. Second, the specific articles and resource pages the AI is reading to form its answers. These are the pages you can potentially earn a link from.
- You write the questions your buyers actually ask.
- Mentionry runs each question daily on the engines on your plan, like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews.
- It records the full answer text, every URL cited, and every brand named.
- From these records, it calculates your visibility, share of voice, and average position for that prompt.
- Recording starts the day you add a prompt. There is no historical data, because an AI's answer from last week does not exist today.
What the market sells and how it works
The market for AEO services is new and unsettled. Many offerings are repackaged SEO audits or content plans. Some consultancies sell strategy based on hypothetical prompt volumes, which requires licensed panel data they do not have. A few software tools track a limited set of engines, often just Google AI Overviews.
Pricing varies widely. Simple tracking tools start around $50 a month. Full service agencies quote retainers from $3,000 a month. Some providers sell on a per placement basis, committing to a number of citations or links. You should examine what is actually being tracked and where the data comes from.
The core service in this market is measurement. The secondary service is outreach to earn citations from the sources AI models use. Almost no provider automates the outreach fully, because sending a pitch from your own domain is a reputational choice. Most stop at providing a list of targets.
Risks and common trade offs
The primary risk is paying for measurement that does not reflect reality. If a tool estimates your visibility from aggregated prompt data, it is guessing. The only factual measurement comes from running your exact prompts and saving the output. Without that, you are buying an estimate.
Another risk is confusing activity for results. A list of "citation opportunities" is not a result. A sent email is not a result. The only result is a verified, live link on a page that an answer engine cites. Many services report the first two steps as success.
A significant trade off is between breadth and depth. Tracking every possible AI surface is expensive and noisy. Tracking only Google AI Overviews misses the conversation happening in ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. You must choose which engines reflect your buyers' behavior, knowing you cannot track them all for free.
- Buying prompt volume data without a licensed opt in panel. This data is modeled, not measured.
- Paying for a guaranteed number of AI citations or links. No one controls an AI model's output.
- Vendors who claim to "place" links in AI answers. They can only help you pitch the human editors of the pages the AI reads.
- Services that promise rankings or traffic from AEO. Visibility in an answer does not guarantee a click.
How to judge an AEO tool or agency
Judge a provider on the specificity of its measurement. It must track the prompts you define, on a schedule, and show you the saved answer text. If it shows only a score or a chart, ask to see the raw data behind it. The data should be a record of a real API call, not an inference.
Examine the link between measurement and action. A good tool shows you the exact pages cited in the answers you are tracking. These are your direct targets for outreach. A weak tool shows you generic "authority sites" in your niche with no connection to what the AI is reading.
Scrutinize the outreach method. Outreach sent from a vendor's pooled domain looks like spam and gets low reply rates. The only sustainable method is sending from your own connected mailbox, with your name, on your domain. This protects your reputation and keeps reply threads in your control.
- What exact prompts do they track? It should be yours, not industry keywords.
- Which engines do they check? Ask for a list. Google AI Overviews alone is not enough.
- Where does their "opportunity" data come from? Is it a live search for pages citing competitors, or a static database?
- How do they handle outreach? Do they send from their system or your mailbox? Sending from their system can hurt your sender reputation.
- What is the verification process? Do they check if a link was placed and is still live, or do they report an email sent as a success?
What Mentionry does differently
Mentionry combines answer engine tracking with the outreach to earn links from the pages AI reads. It has two channels. The Track Answer Engines channel runs your prompts daily against ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI surfaces. It saves every answer, citation, and named brand to calculate your visibility. The AI Answer Visibility channel reads Google AI Overviews specifically to find the pages you can pitch.
For measurement, it records only what it can directly query. It does not sell estimates of prompt volume. It asks the engines your questions and keeps the responses. For action, it finds pages that link to your competitors but not to you, plus resource pages and listicles found by searching your niche. Every opportunity comes with a drafted email sent from your own connected mailbox.
Nothing here is promised. Mentionry does not place or publish links. It sends the pitch. It then verifies outcomes by checking if a link appeared, on which page, and with what anchor text. A link removed later is shown as a change. The scoreboard reports what was earned, not what was sent. Pricing starts at $79 a month for the tracking and opportunity engine, with annual terms available.
Questions people actually ask
Answer engine optimization focuses on the AI surfaces that answer questions directly, like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Gemini. It tracks whether your brand is cited when these engines answer questions your buyers ask. Traditional SEO focuses on ranking web pages in a list of blue links. AEO measures visibility in the answer text itself, not the position of a page in search results.