Something strange showed up in our data recently, and we haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
One of our test domains pulls in about 100 Bing clicks a month. Pretty unremarkable by any traditional SEO standard. But when we looked at AI citation data, that same domain had racked up over 40,000 citations in LLM-generated responses.
Meanwhile, another domain we manage does 40,000 Google organic clicks monthly — solid, healthy traffic — but only 35,000 Bing AI citations.
So one domain is essentially invisible in traditional SEO terms but treated as a trusted authority by AI. The other is a traffic machine that LLMs mostly ignore.
Citations and Clicks Are Not the Same Thing
This feels obvious once you say it, but the implications are bigger than they first appear.
When an LLM cites your domain, it’s not sending a user to your site. It’s borrowing your authority to answer someone’s question. You’re getting brand exposure and trust signals, but your GA4 dashboard shows almost nothing. Traditional SEO metrics — sessions, clicks, bounce rate — completely miss this value.
That’s not a reporting gap. That’s a fundamentally different relationship between content and audience.
In classic SEO, the job is to get someone to your page. In AEO, the job is to be the source the AI trusts enough to quote. Those require different strategies, different content approaches, and honestly, different success metrics.
The Query Itself Has Changed
LLM search queries aren’t structured like Google queries. People aren’t typing “best project management software 2025.” They’re asking things like “what project management tool works best for a remote team that already uses Slack and needs client-facing dashboards?”
That’s a conversational, multi-part, context-heavy question — and the content that wins in that environment isn’t necessarily what ranks on page one of Google. It’s content that’s specific, authoritative, well-structured, and cited across multiple trusted sources.
Entity authority matters more than link authority. Being consistently mentioned in the right contexts — across forums, publications, review sites, and industry resources — tells the LLM you’re a credible source. That’s a different kind of link building.
The Reporting Problem Is Real
Right now, there’s no clean, unified way to track LLM visibility. The closest things we’ve found:
- Bing’s AI Performance report — useful but limited in scope
- Microsoft Clarity’s Share of Authority report — genuinely interesting, still early
- GA4 referral tracking — you can catch some AI-sourced traffic but it’s fragmented and inconsistent
- Key event and ecommerce conversion tagging from AI referral sources — possible but requires intentional setup
None of it gives you the full picture. And that’s a problem when you’re trying to show a client why their citation volume matters even when their click numbers look flat.
Should AEO Be Its Own Service?
We think yes — or at least, it deserves its own track within a broader digital strategy.
Bundling AEO into a standard SEO retainer undersells the strategic difference and muddies performance reporting. When a client asks “is our SEO working?” and you’re mixing traditional ranking metrics with citation authority data, the answer gets complicated fast.
Separate KPIs, separate deliverables, separate reporting cadence — that’s where we’re heading.
Some questions worth thinking through for your own clients or business:
- Are you tracking where your brand appears in AI-generated answers, not just search rankings?
- Do you have content specifically built to answer the conversational, multi-part questions LLMs handle?
- Is your domain appearing consistently enough across trusted third-party sources to build entity authority?
- Could a multi-domain strategy work for you — one domain built for citation authority, another optimized for conversion?
Where This Goes
We’re still in the early innings. The tools are catching up slowly, the best practices are being written in real time, and most clients don’t yet know to ask for this kind of visibility.
But the gap between LLM presence and traditional search presence is only going to grow. The businesses and agencies that start building for both now will have a meaningful head start.
At Primary Position, we’re treating AEO as its own discipline — with its own strategy, its own reporting, and its own definition of success. The data made that case for us before we were ready to make it ourselves.
