Brand boilerplate

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One line

AIOvsSEO is an evidence-first research project on AI Optimization — how to get found and cited by AI engines and search engines alike.

Short

AIOvsSEO publishes research and practical guides on AI Optimization (AIO), the umbrella over GEO and AEO. Its angle is deliberately skeptical: it tests the field's claims against evidence — debunking, for instance, the idea that schema markup drives AI citations — and documents what actually earns a citation from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews.

Naming

Brand name: AIOvsSEO (one word, capital A-I-O, lowercase "vs", capital SEO). Read as "AIO vs SEO". Publisher of record for research: AIOvsSEO Research. Site: aiovsseo.com.

Original research

We audited 18 GEO/AEO companies' own websites (June 2026). We checked the sites of leading GEO/AEO/AI-search vendors for six AI-readiness signals. Liftable findings:

  • 82% carry JSON-LD structured data — the signal evidence shows barely affects AI citations.
  • 0% expose an MCP manifest at /.well-known/mcp.json.
  • 6% (one of 17) declare a Content-Signal directive in robots.txt.
  • 41% serve a real llms.txt file.
  • 24% return markdown to AI agents via content negotiation.

Headline: the companies selling AI visibility mostly ship the cosmetic signal (schema) and skip the structural ones (Content-Signal, MCP). Method and full table on the study page.

Citable statistics

Our sourced reference page, GEO & AEO Statistics 2026, compiles the key dated figures with links to primary sources — AI Overview click loss (~58%), the 94% off-site citation reality, mentions vs backlinks (~3:1), bot traffic (53%), and more.

What we cover

SEO vs AIO, GEO, AEO, entity authority, crawler governance (robots.txt / Content-Signal / .well-known / MCP), the machine layer, IndexNow, the bot-traffic and analytics problem, and the economics of the agent-era web. We also publish a free AIO Playbook skill.

Contact & usage

Media, data and partnership inquiries: via our contact form. You're welcome to quote any statistic or finding with attribution to AIOvsSEO and a link to the relevant page. Every page is also available as clean Markdown for machine use (request with Accept: text/markdown or append .md).

Brand basics: wordmark "AIOvsSEO", accent colour cyan #22d3ee on near-black #0a0a0f. Last updated June 7, 2026.