I Ran My Own AEO Framework on My Own Brand. I Was Invisible.

What happens when you run an AEO framework on your own brand? In my case, this week, both Claude and Perplexity returned zero brand presence for PropSaaS Growth across all five prompts in my own five-archetype framework. The framework was right. The brand is missing. Here is the data, what I learned, and the three things I am committing to this month to close the gap.

The setup

Two weeks ago I published the first PropSaaS Growth blog post. Last week I published a five-archetype prompt set: the questions every B2B SaaS team should be tracking in AI search. This week I ran that framework against my own consultancy. The least comfortable test I have run in months. The most informative one.

I used the Claude Desktop prompt I gave readers in the AI citation tracking tools comparison piece: five archetypes, two engines (Claude with web search, Perplexity via live fetch). The full methodology is in the framework post. The five questions for my brand looked like this:

1. Category-default: "What is the best AEO consultant for B2B SaaS companies?"
2. Job-to-be-done #1: "How do I improve my B2B SaaS company's visibility in AI search?"
3. Job-to-be-done #2: "How do I get cited in ChatGPT and Perplexity for my PropTech category?"
4. Pain-point trigger: "My PropTech SaaS company doesn't appear in ChatGPT recommendations. What should I do?"
5. Buyer-stage qualifier: "What should I look for in an AEO consultant for vertical SaaS?"

I told the engines not to bias toward PropSaaS Growth because I was asking. They did not need the instruction.

The data

Five prompts, two engines, ten synthesized answers. Brand presence: zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero.

For each prompt, the engines named between zero and twelve other consultants or agencies. The most recurring names across both engines: Discovered Labs (cited in four of five prompts), Austin Heaton (a fractional AEO consultant), RevenueZen, Team 4, First Page Sage, NoGood, and on the PropTech-specific pain-point prompt, teoraspace.com.

The brand itself is fine. Site indexes. Blog indexes. LinkedIn indexes. The engines can describe PropSaaS Growth if you ask them about it by name. They simply do not name it when answering category questions.

The standard reading of an absence like this is "AI engines do not know about us." That is wrong. The accurate reading is "AI engines do not know to recommend us." The first is a recognition problem. The second is a citation footprint problem. Those have different fixes.

The mechanical insight (the one lesson worth keeping)

The most useful single finding came from Perplexity's answer to the category-default prompt. Austin Heaton, a fractional AEO consultant, was ranked position 2 in the answer. He was the only individual consultant named, not an agency. Why?

Because he has a blog post titled exactly: "Best AEO Consultant for SaaS Companies in 2026: Austin Heaton."

Query string in the title. Brand name in the title. Page on his own domain. Perplexity cites that page as a primary source, and the named-brand outcome falls out of the synthesis.

This is a clean mechanical play, and it is replicable. The title pattern matters more than the post depth. The post itself is not what closed the gap; the title-matched URL on his own domain did. Anyone willing to publish that page can win the same citation slot for the variant query that matches their positioning.

The competitive insight (purpose-built pain-point pages)

For prompt 4 (the PropTech-specific pain-point), the dominant source on both engines was teoraspace.com. They have two URLs that won the prompt:

• /industries/proptech/not-appearing-in-chatgpt
• /guides/get-cited-by-chatgpt/proptech

That URL pattern is also replicable. Purpose-built landing pages that target the exact phrase a buyer in pain would type. Not blog posts. Landing pages. Different URL structure, different intent.

I have written eight blog posts on AEO. I have written zero purpose-built pain-point landing pages. Both engines confirmed: the landing pages would have won prompt 4 cleanly. The blog posts did not.

Three moves with dates

I am writing these here on purpose. Public commitment is half of accountability.

1. Title-matched category page, by 2026-06-06

One landing page on propsaasgrowth.com with a title-matched H1 for the PropTech variant of the category-default query. Working title: "Best AEO Consultant for PropTech SaaS Companies (2026): PropSaaS Growth." Same mechanic Austin Heaton used. A second variant for vertical SaaS more broadly follows the week after.

Update (2026-05-30): shipped ahead of the date — the title-matched category page is now live here. It folds in the buyer-stage qualifier prompt too: what to look for in an AEO consultant for vertical SaaS.

2. PropTech pain-point landing page, by 2026-06-13

A purpose-built landing page targeting the exact phrasing of prompt 4 ("My PropTech SaaS company doesn't appear in ChatGPT recommendations"). URL pattern modeled on teoraspace.com. Long-form answer to the question. Real diagnostic steps. The work I would actually do for a client who arrived in pain.

Update (2026-05-30): also shipped ahead of the date — the pain-point page is now live here, with the recognition-vs-citation-footprint diagnosis and the five diagnostic steps.

3. Outbound for named inclusion, starting 2026-06-02

Three citation surfaces appeared in four of five prompts across both engines: Discovered Labs (their roundup posts), Nick Malekos's LinkedIn pulse article on AEO agencies, and Reddit (r/SaaS, r/buildinpublic, r/GrowthHacking). Outbound to the first two for inclusion in their next roundups; a small set of value-driven Reddit replies on relevant threads. Cadence: two outbound asks per week, two Reddit replies per week, through end of June. I will publish whatever comes back in a follow-up post.

Why this is harder than it looks

Two things to be honest about.

First, citation footprint compounds. The brands winning these prompts today did not get there in a week. Discovered Labs has been writing about B2B SaaS AEO for at least two years; the recurrence of their domain across queries is the accumulated effect of every article they have published plus every roundup that has cited them. Two weeks of publishing cannot match that. The right horizon for this work is months, not weeks.

Second, the buyer who would type prompt 4 is not the same person as the buyer who reads my blog. A pain-point landing page that wins for "my PropTech SaaS doesn't appear in ChatGPT recommendations" is built for the buyer in active pain. Most of my current blog audience is at Stage 1 or 2 of the buyer journey (curious, scoping). The new pages are Stage 3 (active evaluation). Different surface, different content. I have been writing the first; I have not yet built the second.

Both of these mean the framework is doing exactly what it was supposed to do. It tells you where the gap is, which work moves you, and how long the work will take. The honest answer is "a lot, and several months."

The takeaway

Two takeaways.

One for me: the framework worked. It correctly diagnosed me. The job now is the work, not the diagnosis.

One for any reader running a similar AEO baseline on their own brand. Most of you will look at your data and conclude "we need more content." That is usually wrong. You probably do not need more content. You need a different kind of page, in a different place on your URL structure, with different titles. The five-archetype framework is useful because it tells you exactly which kinds are missing.

Citation surface is built page by page, mention by mention, over months. The honest version of an AEO program is not "we are doing AEO." It is "here is the specific gap, here is the specific page, here is when it ships."

In thirty days I will publish a follow-up: what shipped, what did not, what moved. The first benchmark is the baseline above. The second will be the next run.

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