One developer's month-long AEO experiment finds popular advice unsupported by data
A developer running a small bilingual Chinese-astrology website spent a month testing widely promoted Answer Engine Optimization tactics against actual research to see what holds up. The most repeated AEO advice — adding JSON-LD schema markup — showed no meaningful citation gains on ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews in an Ahrefs study of nearly 1,900 pages, because AI models extract visible HTML rather than structured data. A separate Ahrefs correlation study across 75,000 brands found that AI visibility tracks overall brand prominence, with page count and backlinks ranking among the weakest signals, undermining the case for bulk programmatic content on low-authority sites. The developer also found that targeting head terms dominated by Wikipedia was counterproductive, as large language models heavily favour encyclopedic sources, and redirected effort toward sub-topics with no existing Wikipedia coverage. The key practical takeaway was to place plain-language definitions in the first two visible sentences of each page — the content layer AI systems actually parse.
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