Everyone has an opinion on AEO right now. Most of it is recycled conference talk. Here is what we actually see working, after 20 years of building websites for Canadian nonprofits and healthcare organizations, and after conversations with people like Lily Ray at Amsive who track this more rigorously than almost anyone.
SEO and AEO are not two different things
Google AI Overviews pull from Google's index. AI Mode pulls from Google's index. If you don't rank in Google, you don't get cited in Google's AI answers. Simple as that.
Lily Ray has watched companies dump their SEO teams and go all-in on AI search tactics. Six months later they're losing traffic fast. We've seen the same pattern. Your SEO foundation is not a stepping stone to AEO. It is AEO. The structured data, the FAQ content, the citation building all sit on top of it. Pull the foundation and the rest collapses.
Nobody has schema. That's your window.
72% of Google's top 10 results have schema markup. Only 12% of all websites do. In Canadian nonprofits and healthcare, it's even lower.
Schema tells AI tools who you are and what you do in machine-readable language. Without it, they guess, and they guess badly. We add Organization, LocalBusiness, FAQPage, and Service schema to every site we build. The organizations doing this in 2025 and 2026 are going to be very hard to displace once everyone else figures this out.
FAQ content plus schema is the fastest win you have
Webflow's team took six pages out of their 250,000-page site, added FAQ sections and schema, and waited. Two weeks later those six pages were responsible for 57% of all new AI citations the site received. Traffic on those pages went up 24%.
It works because AI tools are literally built to parse questions and answers. You put a real question as a heading, a direct answer underneath it, back it with FAQPage schema, and you're handing the model exactly what it needs to cite you. We've seen the same dynamic with Canadian clients.
Three pages. Real questions your clients actually ask. Schema on top. Check your citations in a month.
Your content is getting stale and AI notices
95% of ChatGPT citations come from pages updated in the last 10 months. Google has been prioritizing fresh content since 2007. LLMs pull from search results and inherit that same bias.
We've seen organizations hold strong AI citation share just by updating cornerstone content every quarter. Fresh stat, updated legislation reference, new example from a recent project. And we've seen organizations with genuinely good content slowly disappear from AI answers because they published it two years ago and never touched it again.
Update your program pages when you publish your annual report. Update your compliance content when AODA guidance changes. This is AI visibility work now, not just content maintenance.
Pumping out AI content at scale will bite you
Lily Ray has been tracking sites that scaled AI-generated content to game AI search. Some of it worked short-term. Then Google's March 2024 update hit, the biggest update in their history, and those sites dropped hard. Three to six months from tactic to penalty, consistently.
Our take hasn't changed. Use AI to research and edit. The actual knowledge has to come from people who know the work. The Canadian regulatory context, the real client situations, the opinions that come from experience. That's what holds up when the next update hits.
Reddit: look before you leap
Lily Ray has been on Reddit for nearly 20 years. Her advice: do not walk in there with marketing speak. Redditors will destroy you and that thread will rank for years.
Before spending any time on Reddit, go check whether Reddit is even being cited in the AI answers relevant to your sector. For most Canadian nonprofits and healthcare organizations, it isn't. Your time is better spent getting properly listed on Imagine Canada, CharityVillage, Clutch, or your relevant industry association.
What does AEO work actually cost?
Combined AEO and SEO retainers typically run $1,500 to $4,000 per month, depending on site size, content volume, and reporting cadence. One-time AEO audits with structured data implementation run $2,000 to $6,000. These are real Canadian agency numbers, not US prices converted to CAD. Vendors charging under $1,000 a month are either running one report per quarter or not doing the work at all.
What actually works over time
Clean technical foundation. Schema on your important pages. FAQ content that answers real questions from real people. Content you actually update. External listings on credible Canadian sources.
None of it is a hack. All of it compounds.
Learn more about our AEO services or get in touch if you want to know where your organization actually stands.
