Introducing the Recommendations Hub: AEO Recommendations Built For the Full Picture

Most AEO advice is just citation advice in disguise.

Fix your schema. Structure your content so AI can parse it. Write direct answers to common questions. The logic is, if AI can find your page and read it clearly, it will cite you. And citations mean visibility.

The citation trap

Citations do matter. For high-intent queries, especially in ecommerce, a direct link can drive a transaction. Getting cited is a real signal that your content is working.

But citations are only part of how AI decides who to recommend.

AI doesn’t rank pages. It synthesizes answers from everything it knows about a topic, pulled from across the web. The brands that show up consistently aren’t just the ones with well-structured content. They’re the ones that own the conversation landscape around a topic, on their own site, in third-party sources, across the places AI reads when it’s forming a response. In many cases, AI will recommend a brand it’s seen mentioned repeatedly across trusted sources, without citing a single URL from your own site.

That’s why brand mentions are the metric that matters most in AEO. How often is your brand being recommended in AI conversations? Most tools can’t answer that question,  which is precisely why we built Recommendations Hub.

What’s new

Recommendations Hub is the action layer for AI Search Intelligence. It takes everything you know about where your brand stands in AI, and tells you exactly what to do about it, at the topic level, where AI search actually operates.

Right now, it gives you three things:

Strategic recommendations
Identify topic gaps between you and your competitors, and get clear actions to close them.

Content optimization

New content creation

Every recommendation is tied directly to a real topic gap in your AI visibility data, not a generic list of best practices. 

The Hub refreshes on demand, based on the last seven days of AI responses. So when the landscape shifts, which it often does, you’re not working from stale data.

Why topics, not pages

This is the part that makes Recommendations Hub different.

When someone asks for a recommendation, the response reflects what’s true across the entire conversation landscape for that topic. 

• Who’s being discussed? 
• Who is regularly trusted? 
• Who keeps coming up? 

A single well-optimized page doesn’t change that picture on its own.

That’s why the Recommendations Hub works at the topic level. It looks at the full landscape of AI conversations around the topics you’re tracking, finds the gaps between what AI is discussing and where your brand appears, and tells you what to do across your own content, your existing pages, and the territory you haven’t claimed yet.

The unit of competition in AEO is the topic. Your recommendations should reflect that.

What’s coming soon

On-site content is where most brands have the most direct control and the most ground to gain quickly, which is why we’re starting from here. But it’s only one layer of how AI decides who to recommend.

The Recommendations Hub roadmap will expand across every layer of AEO:

Technical AEO optimization: Content is only half the picture. It also needs to fit how AI bots scan and read it. We’re adding technical recommendations alongside content guidance so nothing structural is holding your visibility back.

Third-party source outreach: Many AI citations come from non-brand, off-site sources that AI engines treat as authoritative signals. We’ll introduce recommendations that identify the third-party sources that matter most for your category, so you know exactly where off-site presence would make the biggest difference to your recommendation rate.

Community and UGC content: Community discussion shapes AI answers more than most brands realize. We’ll surface the specific communities, threads, and angles your brand should be engaging with and help you act on them with confidence.

The brands winning in AI search aren’t waiting to be cited. They’re building the kind of presence that makes being recommended inevitable.

Recommendations Hub is live now in AI Search Intelligence. See your topic gaps, know what to fix, and get the briefs your team needs to start closing them.