A while back, a freelancer reached out through our partners page. Good clients, real skills, one problem. He couldn't sell them AEO.
He'd tried. Sit a client down, walk through how ChatGPT decides what to recommend, talk about prompts and citations and visibility. Every time, he watched their eyes glaze over.
I told him what I'll tell you. Don't explain AEO. Show them.
For years that was the hard part. To show a client where they stood, you had to open ChatGPT yourself, type the prompts live, screenshot the answers, and hope it didn't say something different an hour later. There was no tool for it. Now there is.
And here's the part that actually moves people. It isn't seeing their own brand missing. A blank space is easy to shrug off. It's seeing their competitor sitting right there in the answer, named and recommended, while they're nowhere. That's what lands the punch.
You can talk about AEO for an hour and lose everyone in the room. Trust me, I've done it. Or you can put one comparison on the screen and watch it land in ten seconds.
Why explaining AEO is a dead end
The problem with explaining AEO is that it stays abstract until it's about them.
You can describe how language models pull from the web, how they weigh sources, why some brands get named and others don't. All true. None of it sticks. The client nods, says "interesting," and forgets it by lunch.
The mistake almost every freelancer makes is leading with the education. You feel like you have to teach AEO before you can sell it, so you explain harder. You add a slide. And the more you explain, the more abstract it gets.
AEO stops being abstract the second someone sees a competitor recommended in an answer their own buyer is reading right now.
Show them the gap instead
That's what the Brand vs Brand tool is for. You put your client's brand next to their main competitor and let ChatGPT answer the questions their buyers actually ask.
You're not selling AEO anymore. You're showing a gap.
!A detailed ChatGPT answer showing which brand gets recommended for a buyer-intent prompt
And the gap does the work. When a client sees their competitor named first, recommended, described in warm language, while their own brand barely shows up, something shifts. They stop thinking about language models. They start thinking about the deals they're losing while they sit still.
That's the real message, and you never have to say it out loud. If your client does nothing, their competitor is already winning the answer.
How to run one that actually lands
Go to the AEO compare tool. It's free, no signup, runs on ChatGPT, takes about twenty seconds.
Two inputs matter.
- The two brands. Your client, and the competitor they actually lose to. Not the biggest name in the category, the one that keeps beating them in real deals. The comparison hits harder when it's a fight your client recognizes.
- The category. This is where most people go wrong. "Webflow agency" is too broad and gives you a vague answer that proves nothing. Go specific. "Webflow agency for CRO in Switzerland" gives a result your client feels in their gut, because that's the exact buyer they're fighting for.
The tool runs five buyer-intent prompts, the same questions a real buyer types: best in the category, this brand versus that one, recommend one for a specific need, top alternatives.
Then it hands you a side-by-side scorecard. For each brand, you see:
- How often it gets mentioned
- How visible it is across the five prompts
- Where it ranks when it does show up
- The sentiment behind each mention
And a winner badge on top.
Twenty seconds. One screen. No lecture.
Then start the conversation
The scorecard isn't the end of the pitch. It's the opening line.
Every report comes with a shareable link and an OG image built for it. Drop it in an email before the call. Put it in a LinkedIn post. Pull it up on screen and walk your client through their own scorecard, prompt by prompt.
!Shareable Brand vs Brand report with link and OG image to send to clients
Then stop talking and let them react. The good questions come from them now. "Why is my competitor showing up and I'm not?" "Can we fix this?" That's the conversation you wanted all along, and the client started it, not you.
You spent years trying to talk people into caring about AEO. Turns out you just had to show them one page and get out of the way.
Go further with a free account
The public tool runs on ChatGPT, and for a first conversation that's usually enough. ChatGPT is where the room's attention already is.
But it's one engine, and one comparison is a snapshot. A free account opens up the rest:
- Run the comparison against up to five competitors, not just one.
- See the answers across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overview, because they don't all say the same thing.
- Track how the scores move week over week instead of reading a single moment in time.
And when the client wants to know more, that's your opening. Start them on a free account and run the AI visibility baseline report: the full picture of where they stand across every engine, and the work it takes to close the gap.
Before your next call
Run one comparison. Your client against the competitor they hate to lose to, in the category they actually fight in.
You don't need a deck. You don't need an hour. You need one screen that shows a client a gap they didn't know was there, and the room does the rest.
Stop explaining AEO. Show them.