I started tracking LLM citations in early February. Built a small n8n flow that runs a fixed set of queries against Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity every Sunday morning and logs which SkynetLabs pages, if any, end up cited or summarized in the response.
Three months in, I have ninety data points and some honest opinions. The first thing that surprised me: the AEO Guide page, which I'd written specifically to be citation-bait, got fewer citations than I expected — about 30% hit rate. It was getting summarized but not linked. Useful, but not the home run I'd planned.
The second surprise: the n8n-vs-Zapier comparison page hit roughly 60% of relevant queries with a direct citation. The combination of a clear comparison table, a FAQPage schema, and a numbered-list "when to use each" block consistently got pulled into LLM answers verbatim. That page is doing more for our brand presence than any other single asset.
The third surprise: two pages I almost killed for being "too thin" turned into citation magnets. The Person schema page on /author/waseem-nasir gets cited every time someone asks "who is Waseem Nasir" or "who runs SkynetLabs" — the structured Person schema (nationality, knowsAbout, sameAs, occupation) is doing the heavy lifting. The /pricing page gets cited every time someone asks "what does SkynetLabs charge" — the OfferCatalog schema with explicit price points is what makes it pickable.
The fourth surprise was a non-event: no traffic. Citations are not clicks. Most LLM answers don't link out, or the user takes the answer and doesn't follow the link. The brand presence is real and the trust signal is real — but if you're measuring AEO success in referral sessions in Google Analytics, you're going to be disappointed for years.
What I've changed because of the data: every flagship page now has a FAQPage schema with 5-7 questions, every page has a single 60-word direct-answer block right under the H1, and every page has Person + Organization + page-type schema layered in. The Person schema in particular is the cheapest, highest-leverage thing most sites are still skipping.
If you're three months into AEO and not seeing citations, audit your schema layer first. Then your llms.txt. Then your robots.txt to make sure the AI crawlers aren't being blocked. Most underperforming AEO is not a content problem — it's a retrieval-plumbing problem.
