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Every post starts with the answer.

Practical guides to AEO, GEO, and AI search for B2B SaaS and AI teams. Written the way we want AI to read your site: answer first, proof after.

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Technical AEO · 3 min read

llms.txt: what it is, and whether you need one

Short answer. llms.txt is a Markdown file at your site's root that gives AI agents a short, curated summary of your site and links to your most useful pages. It's quick to add, and Chrome's Lighthouse now checks for it. But Google says you don't need it to appear in AI Overviews, and it won't rescue weak content.

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A professional desk setup featuring a laptop open to a clean document, a notebook with handwritten notes, and a cup of coffee, representing the balance between technology and human creativity.Studio notes
· 2 min read

Human first, AI-native: how we actually use AI

Short answer. AI does the legwork at Bearly Creative: research, monitoring AI answers, structuring data, and first drafts. A person makes every decision that reaches a client, from strategy and positioning to every published word. AI makes us faster. People decide what's worth saying.

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A professional slide deck presentation showing a clean, modern dashboard with bar charts illustrating AI search visibility and pipeline growth.Measurement
· 3 min read

AI search metrics to report to your board

Short answer. Report five things each quarter: share of answer across your priority buyer questions, accuracy of how AI describes you, citations of your own pages, AI-referred traffic, and pipeline from buyers who say they found you through AI. Together they show visibility, quality, and business impact, without pretending any single number is precise.

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A close-up of computer code on a dark screen representing structured data for a B2B SaaS website.Technical AEO
· 3 min read

Schema for B2B SaaS: what structured data does for AI search

Short answer. Schema markup isn't required to appear in Google's AI features, and Google says no special structured data is needed. What it does is state your key facts, like who you are, what you sell, and where else you're described, in a format machines read reliably. For B2B SaaS, a few accurate types matter more than dozens of decorative ones.

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A professional portrait of a business founder speaking confidently in a modern, light-filled office setting.LinkedIn
· 2 min read

Founder-led LinkedIn for B2B SaaS: a practical playbook

Short answer. Yes, for most B2B SaaS companies the founder should post on LinkedIn, as long as the ideas are genuinely theirs. Buyers weigh expertise and understanding of their problems heavily, and a founder is the most credible voice for both. A simple system of one conversation a week, turned into two or three posts, makes it sustainable.

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A professional digital illustration showing interconnected nodes representing LinkedIn profiles and AI search results on a dark blue background.LinkedIn
· 3 min read

LinkedIn is now an AI search channel

Short answer. AI engines now cite LinkedIn heavily for professional questions. Research from Profound found it was the most cited domain for professional queries across six AI platforms, and that posts and articles made up a growing share of its citations in ChatGPT. For B2B SaaS, that means founder and team posts are now source material, not just social content.

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A laptop screen showing a B2B software review profile next to an AI chatbot interface.AI search basics
· 3 min read

Why review sites shape what AI says about you

Short answer. Review sites give AI engines what your own website can't: independent, detailed descriptions of your product in customers' own words. When a buyer asks for the best tools in your category, those pages are among the sources an engine can draw on. A current, detailed review profile makes you easier to recommend, and easier to describe accurately.

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A visual representation of an AI search results dashboard showing frequency metrics and brand mentions.Measurement
· 2 min read

What is share of answer, and how do you measure it?

Short answer. Share of answer is the percentage of AI answers, for a defined set of buyer questions, that name your company. Because AI engines rarely give the same answer twice, measure it across many questions and repeated runs, per engine, every month. Frequency of appearance is the signal. Position in a single answer is mostly noise.

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A professional illustration showing two distinct software dashboards being compared side-by-side on a digital tablet.Content
· 2 min read

Comparison pages that buyers and AI engines trust

Short answer. A comparison page earns trust, from buyers and AI engines, when it's honest about where each option fits, specific about the differences, and backed by evidence. Cover the decision factors buyers actually weigh, admit where a competitor is the better fit, and keep every claim current and checkable.

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A close-up of a person writing notes in a professional notebook on a clean desk.Content
· 3 min read

How to write content AI engines will quote

Short answer. Lead every section with a direct answer, back each claim with a specific source, statistic, or example, and make the author's expertise visible. Research on generative engines found that adding citations, quotations, and statistics raised content's visibility in AI answers by up to 40% in testing, while keyword stuffing didn't help.

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A laptop screen showing a GA4 dashboard with custom channel group settings and a Search Console performance report.Measurement
· 3 min read

How to track AI search traffic in GA4 and Search Console

Short answer. GA4 now has a native AI Assistant channel, but it misses some AI traffic: some platforms aren't recognized, some visits lose their referrer, and Google's own AI features count as organic search. Build a custom channel group that matches AI sources by domain, and read Search Console separately for AI Overviews and AI Mode.

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A close-up view of a computer screen showing search engine results pages with an AI-generated summary section prominently displayed at the top.AI search basics
· 3 min read

Google AI Overviews: what they mean for B2B SaaS traffic

Short answer. Independent research shows people click fewer links when Google shows an AI Overview, especially on informational searches. Google says total clicks are stable and better quality. For B2B SaaS, the practical takeaway is the same either way: top-of-funnel traffic is less reliable, so being cited inside the answer, and owning high-intent pages, matters more.

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A digital illustration representing a robots.txt file code snippet on a screen being filtered through a network firewall.Technical AEO
· 4 min read

Should you block AI crawlers?

Short answer. For most B2B SaaS companies, no, not across the board. AI crawlers do different jobs: some collect training data, some power search answers, and some fetch pages when a user asks. You can opt out of training and still allow the search crawlers that decide whether ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity can cite you.

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Cover image for llms.txt: what it is, and whether you need oneTechnical AEO
· 3 min read

llms.txt: what it is, and whether you need one

Short answer. llms.txt is a Markdown file at your site's root that gives AI agents a short, curated summary of your site and links to your most useful pages. It's quick to add, and Chrome's Lighthouse now checks for it. But Google says you don't need it to appear in AI Overviews, and it won't rescue weak content.

Read the guide →
Cover image for How does ChatGPT search choose its sources?AI search basics
· 4 min read

How does ChatGPT search choose its sources?

Short answer. ChatGPT rewrites your buyer's question into one or more targeted search queries, sends them to search providers, reviews what comes back, and writes an answer with citations. To be cited, your site has to let OpenAI's search crawler in, and your pages have to be among the most relevant, reliable results for those rewritten queries.

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Cover image for Why does AI keep recommending your competitor?AI search basics
· 4 min read

Why does AI keep recommending your competitor?

Short answer. It usually isn't your product. AI engines recommend the companies they can describe with confidence: brands that are easy to read, explained clearly on their own site, and mentioned consistently across sources the engines trust. If your competitor shows up in more of those places, they get named and you don't.

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Reading path

New to AI search? Start here.

Five posts, about 31 minutes, in the order we'd explain it on a call. Tick them off as you go and we'll remember where you got to.

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Not started yet. Begin with the difference between SEO, AEO, and GEO.

  1. AEO, GEO, and SEO: what's actually different?7 min
  2. Why AI keeps recommending your competitor6 min
  3. What is share of answer, and how do you measure it?6 min
  4. llms.txt: what it is, and whether you need one5 min
  5. Writing for answer extraction: a brief template7 min
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