Measure it and keep it true: logs, referrals, prompts and a monthly routine
AEO is not a launch, it is upkeep. Pages change, firewalls get new defaults, directories go stale and models get updated. Four kinds of evidence, read once a month, tell you whether assistants can still read you and what they say.
Who reads you: crawler logs
Your server or CDN logs record every request with its user agent. Filter them for the AI crawlers from lesson 1 and look at three things: which pages they read, how often, and the status codes they got. A run of 403s or 429s to an AI crawler is the firewall problem from lesson 2, caught early.
Verify before you trust. User agents are easy to fake, and scanners regularly pretend to be well-known AI crawlers. Use your CDN's verified-bot flag, or check the requesting address against the ranges the crawler's operator publishes.
Who sends you visitors: referrals
When a person clicks a link in an answer, the visit usually arrives with the assistant as the referrer: chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, claude.ai, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com. In your analytics, group those sources together and watch which pages they land on. Those pages are the ones assistants already trust; keep them accurate.
What they say about you: a fixed question set
Write ten to twenty questions a real buyer would ask, from "what is [category]" to "best [category] for [your customer]" and "[you] vs [competitor]". Ask them in each assistant once a month and record whether you are named, how you are described, and who is cited instead. Answers vary from one run to the next, so look at the trend over months, not at a single answer. Tools in the AI search visibility category automate this; a spreadsheet is enough to start.
A monthly routine, in about an hour
1. Run a reader such as the AEO Lens on your homepage and two key pages. 2. Check the crawler logs for blocks. 3. Ask your question set and note the changes. 4. Fix one thing: the page an assistant misdescribed, the profile with a stale fact, or the buyer question you have no page for. 5. Write down what you changed, so next month's answers can be read against it.
What not to do
Do not hide text for bots, serve crawlers a different page from people (cloaking), invent reviews, or publish hundreds of thin machine-written pages. Search engines and assistants treat these as spam, and when they work for a while they misinform the very buyers you want to convince.
Ask the two questions from lesson 1 again, in the same assistants, and compare the answers with the ones you saved. Then write your question set and put the monthly routine in your calendar.
Check yourself
0 / 3Why verify that a request claiming to be GPTBot really is GPTBot?
A user agent is a claim. Verified-bot flags or published address ranges confirm it.
An assistant names you in one run and not in the next. What should you do?
Answers vary run to run; the trend over a fixed set of questions is what tells you something.
Which of these is cloaking?
Showing bots one thing and people another is cloaking, and it is treated as spam.