Your Guide to Enterprise SEO & AEO Centers of Excellence

The digital marketing and AEO/SEO industry is experiencing quite a large shift due to Large Language Models (LLMs). They are redefining how users access information, moving us from a click-centric world to direct answers. For digital marketing teams, understanding and adapting to LLM and AI visibility is imperative for maintaining and growing digital visibility.

While change can make even the most seasoned leader and marketer nervous, really, this is an opportunity. Opportunity to get in front of senior leaders, to make the initiatives you’ve been pushing for finally happen, and to rethink your metrics of success.

And although some may see it as an opportunity to flood LinkedIn with panic inducing messages like: “You’re about to lose all of your website traffic!!!” We see it as an opportunity to continue our commitment to arming you with the tools and processes you need to be successful.

And on that note, we (the intrepid writers of this article) encourage you to continually question claims and data analyses that circulate. Question things like the sample size and statistical significance, claims that say you must do xyz, or you must avoid xyz.

While all data is interesting, ChatGPT averages over 1 billion prompts per day. An analysis that, for example, looks at 1,500 prompts is not by any means statistically significant due to the incredibly low sample size. Before you take anything as fact, question the data and the source.

While trends and specific actions might change, this guide is meant to:

• Bring you up to speed on what the heck is going on
• Give you a scalable enterprise AEO/SEO framework, so you’re able to act and adapt quickly

Okay, so enough intro, let’s do some 101 around AEO terms you may be seeing before we dive into the AEO/SEO center of excellence strategies.

AEO and AI visibility 101: Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between AI and an LLM? What is an LLM?

AI stands for Artificial Intelligence, and LLMs are a type of AI. Examples of popular chat-based LLMs are ChatGPT and Gemini . An example of an LLM search engineSearch Engine
A search engine is a website through which users can search internet content.
Learn more is Perplexity .

What is AI Visibility?

AI visibility refers to the degree to which a brand or content is referenced or linked to within AI-driven platforms. In measurement, we refer to these as brand mentions and website citations.

Is AI Visibility the same as SEO/AEO?

Yes and no. But mostly yes, with a few additional considerations. While core principles of AEO/SEO are more important than ever (like technically sound websites and helpful content) the way people search and the way we measure success have changed. Namely, search has become more specific, conversational, and persona driven, which requires more specific, persona-based content.

How do these chat-based LLMs work?

Let’s approach this in as simple an answer as possible. Basically, an LLM is a statistical map of the human language and looks to predict the next word in a sentence based on semantic relevance.

How does it predict the next word? Here’s an example for you.

Complete the following:

Roses are Red

Violets are ______

What word did you use to fill in the blank? We’re guessing blue. And why did you guess blue? Why would an LLM guess blue? Because 99 out of the 100 times you’ve heard that poem, you’ve heard it as blue. Repetition in the training data helps LLMs predict what comes next.

What is the difference between a native response and something that “grounds in search” in ChatGPT?

ChatGPT will first see if the answer to your query is within its training data. At the time of writing this piece, ChatGPT’s training data for GPT-5 goes up to September 2024. For anything after that, or for real-time information, LLMs like ChatGPT need to use web browsing to retrieve a real-time answer. ChatGPT doesn’t store information from web browsing between your sessions or other user sessions. So if you ask the same question tomorrow, it will need to re-browse the web. (This will be important for later when we talk about new metrics!)

From links to direct answers: What you need to know

The "zero-click" phenomenon

Users are increasingly getting immediate, comprehensive answers directly - either from AI Overviews on Google or from ChatGPT, bypassing the need to click through to a website. This means that simply ranking high in traditional search results may not translate into clicks and web traffic like it once did. In fact, one study reports that in 2024, 60% of searches ended without a click . Up quite a bit from 2022, where only 23% of searches ended without a click.

And it’s not just impacting organic clicks. A recent study found that when an AI Overview Result Type is present on Google, Paid Click Through Rate drops by 54% .

LLMs for recommendations

These models aren't just being leveraged for copy editing or Excel formulas; they're becoming go-to recommenders. When an LLM suggests a brand, product, or service as part of its synthesized answer, it carries significant weight. Being the recommended answer (i.e., having AI visibility) is one of the new metrics of digital success.

How do you drive success?

We believe the best way to prepare, arm, and operate your organization for digital success in this era and the next is through a dedicated AEO/SEO center of excellence.

What is a CoE and how do I know if I need one?

Before we dive into whether or not you need a center of excellence, let’s tackle what the heck a CoE even is.

What is an AEO center of excellence?

In its simplest form, an AEO (and/or SEO) center of excellence is a systematic approach to search and organic visibility. It is a system that is accepted across your organization and driven by internal resources to ensure that everyone is doing things the same/right way. The best AEO/SEO/digital visibility programs are mechanical, but to reach that state, and more importantly, maintain it, you need a team (or teams) dedicated to establishing the system and maintaining it over time. Remember, everyone who touches the site impacts its search performance, so it is imperative that you establish rules and guidelines for folks to follow and update them as best practices in the industry evolve.

Your goal is to establish a system that is not reliant on one person. If the system continues as people come and go, including you, then you have done your job.

How to know if you need a center of excellence

Forgive us for stating the obvious, but if you’re considering whether you need one, and something drew you to this article, you probably do.

Because the truth is, no matter the size of your digital org, every organization can benefit by having some version of a CoE. Especially now, with AI and the quickly evolving nature of all things digital success.

Here are some additional things to consider:

• What is the size of your digital organization?
• What is the makeup of organizational employees vs. agency partners?

These questions don’t necessarily determine if you need one, but will help you determine what type of CoE—centralized, hub & spoke, embedded, or virtual—might work best for you.

Getting started: Teams & metrics critical to your CoE

Before you start building your CoE, it’s important to understand which teams within your organization you can partner with and what metrics you should use to measure success.

Your digital team

Successfully navigating this LLM era of marketing requires a collaborative, integrated approach across your digital marketing functions. While historically teams may have worked in silos, now is the time to get everyone on the same ship, rowing in the same direction.

Digital teams critical to a CoE

Some teams will have a bigger impact on your center of excellence than others. Below are the teams that it’s critical you partner with in order to make the most of your CoE.

AEO/SEO teams

From the current strategy shift of keyword targeting to semantic clarity, ensuring content addresses user intent comprehensively, and structuring content for AI readability, AEO/SEO professionals are the most poised to help your team navigate a strategy for both AEO/SEO & “AEO” visibility.

Content teams

Quality, authoritative, and hyper specific content is one of the most important pieces of both organic and AI visibility. Your content team should be both optimizing existing content and creating net new content that speaks to your various personas, offerings, and products.

Web dev teams

The Web Team plays an important role in making sure your website content is accessible to search engines and LLMs. This includes making sure content is available via the source code and reducing JavaScript-only content. They also support work on implementing Schema Markup, which is becoming increasingly important in helping these new robots better understand and more quickly find the answers.

Leadership

Depending on the size and structure of your organization, you’ll need the Director & the VP of the above teams, and potentially the CMO on board to support and champion your CoE. Their support is paramount in the success of your CoE. More on presenting to them later.

Teams that support the CoE dream

Below are teams that have a hand in building and maintaining your CoE, but they don’t have the same direct impact as the teams we previously mentioned.

Brand & product teams

This team should be arming the rest of the digital team with specific personas and as much specificity about the persona and the product as possible. This is key in creating content that is recommended in personalized search.

PR teams

Public relations teams are a key player in making sure you secure high-quality brand mentions and third-party validation in reputable news outlets, industry publications, and review sites because they directly feed into an LLM's understanding of your brand's authority. LLMs frequently pull information from these established and credible sources.

Social teams

Social media content and active brand engagement can contribute significantly to LLM training data and real-time retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Platforms like Reddit and other online communities, User-Generated content, as well as Brand posts on places like Instagram can all strengthen signals and be used as referenced content in the LLMs answer. We’re even starting to see Instagram citations in AI Overviews and People Also Ask result types.

Analytics teams

As attribution becomes increasingly harder to track, and the contribution all marketing teams make in driving LLM-sourced traffic, your analytics team plays an important role in understanding what’s actually happening on the site, and what, ultimately, is converting.

The new metrics that define success

As the landscape shifts, so too must our definitions of success. Why?

Well, the most obvious reason might be that a rise in zero-click searches means less traditional traffic, but there are some other considerations. Specifically:

1. Attribution is getting messy. Not only does this new world result in fewer actual clicks, but not all link clicks contain a referrer header. Without a referrer header, these clicks often get attributed to the dreaded Direct/Source (none) bucket. ChatGPT has tried to remedy this by adding UTM parameters. And even if they do contain a referrer header, they aren’t consistently showing up in the same source. We’ve seen traffic from ChatGPT show up in Referral and Organic, too.
2. As outlined above, multiple digital teams contribute to success on LLMs. Having a siloed team with siloed metrics is no longer accurate or impactful to the success of your overarching goal.

Key metrics for measuring AEO and AI visibility

When it comes to measuring your brand’s AI visibility and evaluating your AEO efforts, not all metrics are created equal. Some tell a whole story of your brand’s presence and authority, while some add helpful color to make for easier decision-making. Below are the key metrics that folks should 100% consider when measuring AI visibility.

• Brand mentions & market share in LLMs: How frequently and prominently is your brand cited in LLM responses to relevant queries? This indicates your brand's presence within the direct answer ecosystem.
• Quality & sentiment of mentions: It's not just about quantity; it's about accuracy, positivity, and context. Are the LLM mentions reflecting your brand positively and providing correct information?
• Traffic & site conversions: While direct click-throughs from LLMs may be lower, the overall impact on brand awareness and indirect traffic can be substantial. Teams should focus on holistic website traffic and conversion metrics, acknowledging the evolving attribution challenges. AI visibility contributes to overall brand discoverability, even if the conversion path is less linear.

Shifting metrics of SEO visibility

Traditional SEO metrics aren’t just going the way of the dodo just yet. In fact, some of our tried and true SEO metrics are just shifting to become more prominent than in prior periods as search experiences change. Below are some metrics to focus on when measuring your SEO Success.

• Growing impressions & organic market share: Due to the behavioral shifts in actually clicking through to a site, the best way to measure impact on AEO/SEO activities is if it led to an increase in Impressions and Market Share.

Additional metrics to monitor

Below are some metrics that help add color to the story that the larger metrics are telling. While they aren’t as critical as the key metrics from earlier, they still have an impact on your visibility at large.

• Branded search demand: About half of all searches in 2024 were Branded/Navigational . Monitoring your branded search demand on Google can signal how effective your overarching marketing efforts have been. Social campaigns, PR campaigns, Traditional Ad campaigns, and an increase in LLM mentions can all drive search demand for your brand.
• AI crawler/bot traffic: Not only do you want to make sure your pages are accessible to LLMs, but the pages most visited by these different bots contain a wealth of insight. Take ChatGPT, for instance, which currently has three bots: GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, and OAI-SearchBot . They play various roles in training future models, building internal indexes, and as “on-demand” crawls for when it grounds in search. This can give you better insight into what pages and types of content and queries ChatGPT is looking at your site for, as well as what users are directionally chatting with these LLMs about in relation to your organization.

Action-based and agility metrics to consider

What is an action-based metric? So glad you asked. It aims to diversify how we measure our digital marketing team or contributors' success and introduces a metric of measurement based on the actions taken, not just the clicks it drove.

Here are some examples of action-based, agility metrics we’re considering:

• Content velocity: How many pieces of net new content & content optimizations were launched this quarter against the goal?
  • It’s important to first assess your actual content velocity ability and think about how long it takes something to go from draft to live on site. From there, you can set a goal to measure against. If your quarterly goal is 25 new pieces of content, and the team launched 30 new pieces of content, they exceeded their content velocity goal.
• Time to act: A “time to act” metric brings visibility into how the people, processes, and technology are working together to drive success. Like, when an opportunity or issue is identified, how long does it take the team to act?
  • The exact “action” will vary by team, structure, and role but not only does it reward and encourage the team to take quick action, it identifies where there are opportunities to gain efficiencies, remove bottlenecks, and implement technology.

For example, you’ve set a goal to reduce the delay for identifying and flagging high impact issues from 1 week to 72 hours. One day, the team receives an alert from Conductor Web Monitoring that the robots.txt changed - a rule was added to disallow Googlebot. Yikes! Good news is Web Monitoring checks your robots file every 5 minutes, so the team knew right away and immediately submitted a ticket. The time to act went from 1 week to 15 minutes.

We’re not saying that you need to completely throw your old metrics and KPIs out the window. However, it may be time for you and your organization to evaluate what truly is indicative of success, and what activities are driving it.

A recap of AEO/SEO CoEs

Navigating the shift from Google’s blue links to zero-click search isn’t easy. But now that you understand the shift to LLM search, the importance of establishing an AEO/SEO center of excellence, and the new blend of teams and metrics required for success, it's time to put it into practice and lead your organization into the future of digital visibility.

To guide you through this process, we put together an in-depth eBook to take these concepts and put them into action. Check out the eBook to get:

• Step-by-step blueprints for designing, building, and scaling your AEO/SEO center of excellence.
• A guide to help you effectively communicate the need for a CoE and secure crucial buy-in from senior leadership.
• Detailed frameworks for choosing the right CoE model for your organization.
• Actionable templates and worksheets for defining, tracking, and reporting on the new metrics that truly matter for AI visibility and business impact.

Read the eBook and start building the system that will define your digital success for years to come.