Solutions · By team
You optimised for rankings. Buyers moved to answers.
Prefer is the AEO layer on top of your SEO stack: it shows which of your pages AI engines actually cite, which buyer questions have no page at all, and turns every gap into a brief with the evidence attached.
The new console
The dashboard rankings never showed you.
Citations per engine, the pages earning them, coverage of the questions that matter, and whether the bots can even read you. Twelve weeks into the Ledgerly engagement, it looks like this.
Perplexity re-crawls fastest, so it moves first. When a page works there, the others follow within two cycles.
Engines quote tables and steps, not essays. The parity table is the single most-cited block on the site.
The standup
The questions your rank tracker can't answer.
Three questions that now land on SEO and content teams every week, each with the receipt Prefer puts behind it.
“We rank #2 for this. Why does ChatGPT never mention us?”
Your answerBecause engines read sources, not SERPs. For this prompt they cite two review sites and a Reddit thread, and we are on none of them. Rankings and citations are different games on the same board.
“What should we publish next?”
Your answerNot more blog posts. Eleven tracked prompts have thin or zero coverage, ranked by what they cost us. The top one arrives as a brief: outline, target URL, the queries it should win.
“Did the page we shipped actually work?”
Your answerThe comparison hub went from 71 to 94 coverage, was re-crawled in 3 days, and now earns citations on 4 of its 6 target prompts. If it had not moved, it would have reopened with new suggestions.
The workflow
It plugs into the stack you already run.
Prefer does not replace your SEO tools. It covers the layer they cannot see, and hands the work back in the shape your team already uses.
The honest split of a typical queue.
Briefs land with evidence, scored by impact.
Briefs export to Jira, Linear, Asana and your CMS. Coverage re-scores nightly, so done means measured.
Reporting
Prove content works, without a screenshot deck.
A weekly citations digest that reads like a changelog: what got cited, what got crawled, what to ship next. Every line links to the answer behind it.
Citations · Week 12: 214 total, /vs/ramp breaks through
The digest is the standup update, written for you. Paste it and get on with the work.
The 90-day arc
One quarter of shipping against the gaps.
Ledgerly's content team, two writers and one technical SEO. No new headcount, one new habit: publish against the gap list, not the content calendar.
- BaselineWeeks 1-296 citations a week from 16 pages. 16 open gaps, crawl health 82%
- PlumbingWeeks 3-6Bots unblocked, schema live, redirects fixed. Crawl health to 93%
- Publish against gapsWeeks 7-10Comparison hub, migration guide and 3 refreshes shipped from briefs
- CompoundingWeeks 11-12214 citations a week from 38 pages. 11 gaps left, all briefed
“We were shipping four posts a month and hoping. Now we publish against a ranked gap list, and I can show the exact answer that started citing us nine days after a page went live.”
Questions
Asked plainly.
Is AEO different from SEO?
It builds on it. SEO earns rankings from crawlers; answer engine optimization (AEO) earns citations from AI assistants. The overlap is real, clean structure and crawlability matter to both, but engines cite sources, not positions, so the work is measured differently.
We rank well. Why doesn't AI cite us?
Because AI answers are assembled from sources like review sites, communities and comparison pages, not from the SERP. You can rank #1 and be absent from every answer. Prefer shows exactly which sources each answer uses, so you know where to show up.
How do I find AI content gaps?
Prefer scores every tracked buyer prompt against your indexed pages nightly. Prompts with thin or zero coverage surface as gaps, ranked by cost, each with a drafted brief: page type, outline, target URL and the queries it should win.
Does AI-written content hurt E-E-A-T?
Thin, unsourced content does, whoever wrote it. Prefer drafts against your own documents and live sources, attaches a citation to every claim, runs an originality scan, and publishes nothing without your review.
Can I see AI crawler traffic like Googlebot in GSC?
Yes. Agent Analytics reads your server logs and shows every AI bot fetch: which pages GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot read, which they never reach, and the status codes they get. No JavaScript tag, because bots don't run it.
Will this replace our SEO tools?
No. Keep your rank tracker and GSC. Prefer adds the layer they cannot see, citations, answer coverage and AI crawl behaviour, and sits beside them with a GSC side-by-side view.