I have been quietly losing top-of-funnel traffic to a thing I cannot click on. Not a competitor. Not a Reddit thread. The Google AI Overview box at the top of the SERP. The thing that pulls a paragraph out of the open web, paraphrases it, slaps a few citation chips next to it, and answers the question before the user ever scrolls down to my listing. For a year I have been telling myself I would do something about it. Last week I finally sat down and audited my own homepage to figure out why I was not getting cited.

The audit took most of a Saturday. Some of it was infuriating. Some of it was satisfying in the way that only finding and fixing a stupid mistake can be. I want to write down what I actually found, because most of the AEO and "answer engine optimization" writing I have read this year is too abstract to act on.…