Buyers ask AI who to call.We make it say your name.
Cognos is a managed AEO program. Our team runs it on your account — fixing what blocks AI from citing you, mapping the questions buyers actually ask, and publishing answers everywhere those engines look. You review the work before it publishes.
Illustrative example
In May 2026 Google renamed Search to Ask. That was not a rebrand.
The largest search company on earth conceded that its product is no longer a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews all return one answer, synthesized from dozens of sources, citing the handful of businesses that earned the mention. There is no page two. There is not even a page one.
traffic, from hundreds of millions of monthly visitors to a fraction, in under twelve months.
decline, roughly 800 million annual visitors lost in one year as answers absorb editorial content.
per share, after students started asking AI instead of the platform.
fewer questions, as engineers route them straight to AI instead of a community forum.
The Condé Nast CEO, publisher of Vogue, Wired, GQ and The New Yorker, told his teams in May 2026 to plan their businesses as if Google search traffic is zero. Not declining. Zero.
A managed program that makes your business the answer.
Not software you log into. We fix what is blocking AI from reading your site, map the questions buyers actually ask in your category, publish the answers everywhere those engines look, and keep adjusting as they change.
Named in the AI answers for the questions that bring you customers.
Review the content before it publishes. That is the whole ask.
Log into a platform, learn a tool, or manage vendors.
One system. Four subsystems. None of it on your plate.
This is what runs behind the program. It is the part clients never touch and never have to.
It finds the blockers and writes the fix.
Cognos continuously audits every technical factor that governs SEO and AEO: crawlability, rendering, indexation, schema, canonical integrity. It does not stop at naming the problem. It produces the fix for everything it finds, and a third of the rule set applies itself directly on your site. Not a report recommending fixes. The fix itself.
- LLM crawler access ready
- Schema and structured data fixed
- Rendering and processing fixed
- Canonical and redirect integrity fixed
- robots.txt directives ready
Every finding gets a fix written. These two touch infrastructure we do not own.
- Crawlability
- Schema
- Automatic remediation
The brain behind every piece we publish.
A self-refining editorial intelligence that internalizes your brand, voice, offer, and audience. Before anything earns publication it is interrogated by seventeen independent scoring gates. Output: blogs, guides, press releases, and Google Business Profile posts engineered to be cited.
Dashed line is the publication threshold
- 17 scoring gates
- Self-refining voice
It knows what AI is looking for right now.
Proprietary retrieval mapping charts the keywords, prompts, and content answer engines hunt for when your customers ask a question. Including the branches where competitors answer badly or not at all. That white space is where your next customer is already asking.
- Tax relief pricing for the self-employedopportunity
- Average offer in compromise costcontested
- Flat fee vs contingency attorneyscovered
- Hidden fees in relief contractsopportunity
- Live demand mapping
- Competitive gaps
Your existing content gets stronger, not stale.
Content and Fan-Out run in a loop across your site and your library, surfacing where your own pages compete and where a page has gone out of date. The engine finds the candidates. A strategist decides whether a change is worth making and what it should be, because sometimes the right answer is to leave a page exactly where it is.
Three pages competing for the same query
Merge into one pillar, keep the URL that already holds the links
- Found automatically
- Applied by judgment
Illustrative readouts. The shape of the output, not a client account
An AI does not look up your keyword. It asks thirty smaller questions first.
Before it answers, the model breaks the question apart and retrieves evidence for each piece. Rank for the headline phrase and you can still be absent from every branch that decides the answer.
So the Fan-Out Engine maps the tree first. Every branch gets scored by commercial value, then we publish against the ones worth owning. Nothing gets written before the map exists.
"Best tax resolution firm for a self-employed owner with IRS debt?"
- Average IRS offer in compromise cost
- Tax relief pricing for the self-employed
- Flat fee vs contingency tax attorneys
- Hidden fees in tax relief contracts
- Offer in compromise eligibility requirements
163 rules, run continuously against your site.
The technical layer is not a vague promise to handle the technical stuff. It is a rule engine with a fixed, auditable scope. Every check has a detection method, a severity, and a defined fix.
Canonicals, redirects, crawl errors, indexability, hreflang, orphan pages.
Titles, meta, headings, alt text, Open Graph, viewport, landmarks.
Sitemaps, robots.txt, llms.txt, ai.txt, cannibalization, crawl depth.
AI crawler access, schema coverage, speakable markup, entity disambiguation.
Thin and duplicate pages, readability, freshness, soft 404s, structure.
Page weight, images, caching, compression, render-blocking resources.
HTTPS, HSTS, TLS, mixed content, CSP and the standard response headers.
LCP, INP, CLS, FCP and TTFB against Google's thresholds.
Every finding is graded blocker, high, medium or low, so the things actually costing you citations get fixed first.
33 of the 163 are remediated automatically on your site. The rest are guided or handled by our team.
Twenty checks exist only because answer engines exist: llms.txt, ai.txt, AI crawler access, speakable markup, entity disambiguation.
Four steps. Yours is signing off on the work.
From kickoff to live optimization in roughly seven days. After that, the only thing we need from you is a review before anything publishes.
Audit
Crawl health, canonical accuracy, schema, LLM crawler access, redirect chains, broken pages, Core Web Vitals. You get a plain-language report of what is blocking your AI visibility and what each issue costs you in citations.
Map
Our discovery engine identifies the 100 to 300 sub-queries AI systems investigate when building answers about your services. Real observed retrieval behavior, organized by commercial value and coverage priority.
Reinforce
Website, FAQ pages, Google Business Profile, press releases, social, authority citations. Each asset maps to a specific fan-out cluster. Nothing is produced without a retrieval path to satisfy.
Adapt
Google confirmed four algorithm updates in 2025. Answer engines shift continuously and publish no changelog. Cognos adapts your optimization as the models change, so retrieval coverage does not decay.
Three deliverables every month, each mapped to a branch of your tree.
Technical optimization runs continuously underneath all of it. These are the things that land in your account on a cadence.
Content articles
Long-form articles built to satisfy high-priority fan-out clusters: clean heading hierarchy, FAQ schema, explicit answers to the retrieval queries we mapped.
- Every article clears 17 independent quality gates before it publishes.
- Retrieval targets come from the Fan-Out Map, not a keyword tool.
- FAQ, Article and HowTo schema attached and validated at publish time.
Google Business Profile
Every post is a retrieval reinforcement node, written to answer a specific fan-out query where AI looks for business data. Q&A managed directly.
- GBP is a first-class retrieval surface for local AI answers.
- Citation consistency audited monthly against the live map.
Press releases
Not announcements. Authority signals, structured around research, market trends, and industry data, distributed through channels AI treats as authoritative.
- Framed around original data, the shape answer engines pull as evidence.
- Each release maps to a cluster competitors are underweight in.
Citations compound. The businesses cited today are the ones AI trusts tomorrow.
Every one of these came from a real prospect on the call before signing.
How is Cognos different from my existing SEO agency?
Most SEO agencies optimize for keyword rankings in traditional search, a metric that matters less every quarter as AI Overviews take more of the result. AEO requires different work: backend first, schema heavy, retrieval reinforced across several channels at once. An existing SEO program can be performing well and still carry thousands of AEO blockers. Cognos handles both disciplines in one continuous program, and because we built the underlying software there is no tool markup passed to clients.
I already pay for SEO. Do I need AEO too?
Yes, and counterintuitively the more invested a site is in traditional SEO best practices, the more likely it has AEO-specific blockers. The two disciplines read a page in opposite orders: SEO reads content first and backend metadata second, AEO reads backend metadata first. Optimizations that serve one do not automatically transfer to the other.
Can my in-house team just do this?
Three things make it genuinely hard in house. The update cadence: answer engines shift continuously with no changelog, so a manual optimization round is usually outdated before it ships. The Fan-Out Map: capturing 100 to 300 sub-queries per service from live AI retrieval behavior is weeks of specialized technical work. The coverage scope: reinforcing each priority query across site, GBP, press, social, and authority channels at once needs a dedicated team.
How long until I see results?
Clients typically see an initial surge at the end of month one as the most critical technical blockers clear and the Cognos script deploys. A second, larger surge tends to follow around month three as retrieval reinforcement accumulates across channels. Timelines vary with starting baseline, category competition, and content participation, so we describe what the typical client experience has looked like rather than predicting yours.
What is the contract length?
Month to month with 30 days notice. The setup fee is $1,000 one time, and the monthly program begins at $1,500 for businesses under $1M in revenue.
What happens if I cancel?
Everything produced during your program stays: articles, GBP posts, press releases. The Cognos script comes down and continuous technical optimization stops. Your foundation remains, but the models keep evolving without the automated adaptation the program provides.
How involved do I need to be?
Minimal. The main ask is reviewing content before publication for factual accuracy and brand voice. Strategy, technical work, content production, GBP management, press distribution, and reporting sit on our side. You do not log into any platform.
Does Cognos work for local businesses?
Local and regional businesses tend to do particularly well. AI search is increasingly location aware, so local retrieval signals carry real weight: Google Business Profile, local schema, location-specific content clusters, citation consistency. Full GBP optimization and local reinforcement are part of every program.
Find out how visible you are to AI before your competitors do.
Send us your URL. We run the full AEO audit against your site and send back a plain-language report of every blocker keeping AI from citing you.