Running AEO across multiple brands

The method transfers completely: check access, correct facts, close citation gaps, build topic depth, measure weekly. That sequence works in any category.

The findings transfer not at all. Which sources decide a category is specific to that category, so a list built for a fintech client is close to useless for a healthcare one. Reusing it is the most common way agency AEO work goes wrong.

Sharing a prompt set across clients in the same vertical is tempting and produces misleading numbers. Two competitors in one market still have different buyers asking different questions with different constraints.

The questions that matter most — the objections from sales calls, the lost-deal comparisons — are by definition client-specific, and those are the ones closest to revenue.

AEO retainers fail when the first month promises movement that the mechanism cannot deliver. The sequencing is predictable enough to scope properly.

• Month one — baseline across thirty to fifty prompts, crawler access confirmed, stale facts found and corrected. Deliverable: a measured starting position and a ranked gap list.
• Month two — the highest-weight citation gaps worked. Deliverable: placements earned, and early movement on the fastest fixes.
• Month three — topic depth on the questions where the client is absent. Deliverable: published pages, plus the first trend that is long enough to read.

A client wants their own numbers, not a slice of an agency dashboard. Read-only report links scoped to one brand solve this cleanly: the recipient sees their report and nothing else.

Internally the portfolio view is the opposite — every brand on one screen, sorted by what moved. Those are two different products for two different audiences, and conflating them serves neither.

Correcting a fact on a heavily-cited source can move within weeks. Earning authority on a new source takes months. Promising either on the other's timeline is how retainers get cancelled in month three.

Report the trend rather than the snapshot, and keep the answers behind every figure. When a client disputes a number — and they will — opening the actual response an engine wrote ends the conversation in seconds.