AEO Best Practices For PR Teams: An AI Search Playbook
Historically, PR teams and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) professionals didn’t have much to collaborate on. PR cultivated high-value news coverage, while SEO pros’ off-site efforts were almost exclusively focused on hunting down dofollow backlinks.
But with the dawn of AI Assistants and the emergence of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), the necessity for PR, AEO/SEO, and content teams to collaborate has grown rapidly.
Large language models (LLMs) see the world through a contextual lens, absorbing patterns of association, authority, and credibility across enormous volumes of data in ways traditional search engines don’t. One of the biggest differences between SEO and AEO is that positive brand mentions, even without a link, can be beneficial for AEO.
This shift means it’s now vital for PR, Organic Growth, and Content teams to work together. And the teams that embrace this early will have an advantage in a quickly evolving space. As an organic growth consultant who has had the pleasure of working with some tremendously skilled PR teams, I’m happy to share a few AEO best practices to help you get started.
5 AEO Best Practices & Effective Tactics For PR Teams
AI Assistants and the emergence of AEO have opened up new avenues for PR teams to expand and adapt their services. Here are some of the highest-impact moves every PR team should make right now to capitalize on AI search.
1. Target Niche Audience Publications
Placements in smaller publications that are hyper-relevant to your target audience can be just as valuable as getting published in major news outlets when it comes to AEO.
AI assistants don't serve identical answers to every user. Tools like ChatGPT tailor responses based on available context (prior conversation history, stated personal goals, etc.). A VP of Marketing at a B2B SaaS company asking about AEO strategy will likely receive a different answer than a freelance blogger asking the same question, because the model draws on different pools of contextually relevant sources.
Therefore, a mention in a trade publication your exact ICP reads regularly can actually carry more contextual weight than a passing reference in a broader outlet with ten times the traffic. This is not to say that you abandon the high-traffic sources altogether. They still play a critical role in driving credibility and general awareness. But seriously consider experimenting more with niche sources to get picked up by the AI chat tools in contextually-relevant conversations.
2. Build AEO on Top of a Strong SEO Foundation
The companies winning at AEO are quite often the ones already winning at SEO, because 80 to 90 percent of what’s good for SEO is also good for AEO. So, it’s important for PR teams that are interested in AEO to familiarize themselves with SEO basics. Here are a few foundational SEO (and AEO) concepts to start with.
- Heading hierarchy: You must use headings in logical sequence rather than as a design choice. Clean structure helps both Google crawlers and LLMs parse the meaning of your content accurately. This means you get one H1 on a web page. Your first title should be the H1, and all subsequent headers should read like a table of contents that rolls up into that H1.
- Schema markup: AI systems rely on explicit, machine-readable signals to understand page content, so make sure you know when and how to use schema markup. There are tools out there that make this easier. For instance, Wistia now offers LLM-friendly video embed codes with transcripts in the HTML, and Webflow has introduced auto-generated schema as a native feature.
- FAQs and interview formats: LLMs are trained on conversational input and optimized to answer questions. Content structured in question-and-answer format is already packaged in the way these models are built to read. This is why many AEO strategists will add FAQ sections to websites and why PR teams should seek out interview-type placements for clients interested in boosting AEO.
3. Leverage Variety of Content Formats but Ensure Crawlability
Incorporate video formats such as podcasts, webinars, and recorded interviews into your PR strategy, but make sure they’re crawlable.
One study conducted by Ahrefs found that YouTube mentions can have a strong impact on AI visibility, with a correlation coefficient of approximately 0.737. However, the secret lies not in the video itself, but in the transcript. Traditional and AI search crawlers aren’t able to understand images and videos the way a human would, so they rely on metadata, schema markup, and crawlable text associated with videos and imagery to understand the content. This is part of why SEOs have been touting the value of Alt Text for images since long before AI assistants became a thing.
Podcasts, webinars, and recorded speaking engagements carry huge potential AEO benefits, but only when they are published with transcripts or written summaries that AI crawlers can actually read. So, diversify your content types, and ensure they’re optimized for all types of search engines.
4. Don’t Overlook Quote Contributions
Quotes are one of the most underutilized AEO assets for PR teams. A 2024 study analyzing over 10,000 queries found that adding citations and quotations to content as part of a multi-faceted Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) strategy improves visibility in AI-generated responses by as much as 40%.
A named person attached to a credible claim on a respected publication builds a pattern of association that compounds over time, even without a backlink. The principle applies equally to subject matter experts, your content team, and especially your leadership. A C-suite quote in an article unrelated to your brand still registers as a signal. LLMs learn who your people are, what they know, and what circles they run in.
Building ongoing relationships with writers and journalists who regularly seek expert quotes across both major publications and niche industry sites is good for AEO.
5. Put Quality Over Quantity
Everybody now has access to sophisticated AI writing tools. The result is a web increasingly flooded with content that’s accurate enough to be published, but thin and empty enough to be forgotten.
The brands that stand out in AI search are the ones asking a harder question before they publish anything: Does this provide real value beyond what already exists? If the answer is no, the content should not go out.
This is not a new principle, but rather it’s just more consequential now. AI systems are trained on the web's best signal, and they have an enormous amount of content to choose from. Your content needs to be genuinely worth citing, which means you need to contribute something original.
As Scott Krady, Founder and CEO of Magnitude, Inc., said on our webinar, Digital PR and AI Search in the Agentic Era, “AI is creating huge opportunities for PR professionals. The temptation is to use it as a shortcut to get away from authenticity and have a lot of things delivered for you on demand, but it really comes down to storytelling and the authenticity that you put within your story, and that will not change anytime soon.”
Quality and quantity are not mutually exclusive, but quantity should never scale past your ability to maintain quality. That is the line that separates brands building durable AI visibility from those generating noise.
AI Rewards Consistency Over Bursts of Activity
AI assistants are optimized to give users the most relevant, current answers available, and that has a direct implication for PR, organic growth, and content teams.
Refreshing owned content on a regular cadence has been a mainstay of SEO strategy for years, but it’s even more important for AEO. Ahrefs found that “AI assistants prefer content that is 25.7% fresher” compared to traditional search tools.
The same logic extends to earned and paid media. A PR strategy that only activates around product launches or funding announcements is leaving compounding visibility on the table. You have a much higher likelihood of appearing consistently in AI search mentions and citations if you are securing regular PR placements and brand mentions across authoritative platforms and publications.
Brands and marketing teams need to think of PR as a publishing operation rather than a sporadic campaign. Coverage should be ongoing, distributed, and varied in format. That consistency is what builds the contextual footprint that models draw on over time.
Working With PR Teams To Achieve AEO Success
As an AEO agency partner, BX Studio works with PR firms and in-house PR professionals at a wide range of companies to build winning organic growth strategies. If you’d like to learn more about our collaborative approach to off-site AEO and SEO strategies or how we partner with PR agencies, please send us a message! We’d love to hear from you.
