A living AEO operations manual built from your data

Not a static PDF. Not a one-time report. The Quoted Playbook is a continuously updated content operations guide—built from your longitudinal citation data, refined every quarter, and designed to be the single source of truth for how your team creates content that gets cited by AI engines.

Quoted Playbook
Executive Summary
Prompt Landscape
Persistence Analysis
Competitor Intel
Content Gaps
Guidelines
Voice & Tone
Action Plan
76
34%
18%
15%
High
High
Med
1,800 – 2,400
120 – 180 wps
Question H2s

Generic AEO advice expires. Your playbook compounds.

Every AEO guide on the internet gives you the same advice: add schema, use answer-first structure, keep content fresh. That's fine as a starting point. But it doesn't tell you which tactics actually move the needle in your vertical, for your prompts, against your competitors. The Playbook does.

Data-backed, not opinion-based

Every recommendation traces back to statistical findings from your longitudinal citation data. We don't guess what works—we measure it.

Specific to your vertical

What drives citation persistence in cybersecurity is different from martech. Your playbook reflects the patterns that matter in your market, not generic best practices.

Always current

Quarterly deep-dives feed new findings into the playbook. Tactics get validated, refined, or deprecated based on fresh data. You always have an up-to-date SOP.

Eight chapters. Every one backed by your data.

The Playbook is organized as a complete content operations manual. Each chapter addresses a different dimension of AEO performance—from high-level strategy down to line-by-line structural guidance.

01

Executive Summary & Citation Health

Your citation health score, key changes since the last update, top wins, emerging risks, and the three highest-priority actions for the coming quarter. Written for leadership—everything they need in two pages.

02

Prompt Landscape Map

The complete set of prompts your buyers ask AI engines, organized by buyer stage (awareness, education, comparison, decision). Which prompts you're cited on, which you're missing, and which ones carry the most commercial value.

03

Citation Persistence Analysis

Which of your pages hold citations over time and which decay. Persistence scores by URL, by engine, and by prompt category. The structural features that correlate with longevity in your vertical.

04

Competitor Citation Intelligence

Who gets cited on your prompts, what they do structurally, and where their content outperforms yours. Side-by-side feature comparisons on the prompts that matter most to your buyers.

05

Content Gap & Opportunity Matrix

A prioritized list of content to create or restructure, ranked by citation impact. Each gap includes the target prompt, the current winner, and the specific structural changes needed to compete.

06

Structural & Formatting Guidelines

The content blueprint: optimal word counts, heading structures, schema markup recommendations, answer placement, source attribution patterns, and entity clarity standards—all calibrated to what persists in your vertical.

07

Voice & Tone for Citation Persistence

How the way you write affects whether you get cited. Sentence structure patterns, confidence signaling, definitional clarity, and the specific voice characteristics that correlate with citation persistence in your market.

08

Quarterly Action Plan

A concrete, prioritized task list for the next 90 days. What to publish, what to restructure, what to monitor. Each action links back to the data that generated it, so your team knows why it's a priority.

Browse a sample playbook as if it were yours

This is what a Quoted Playbook looks like inside. Click through the chapters to see the kind of analysis, recommendations, and operational guidance you'd receive. All data shown is illustrative.

Quoted Playbook
Acme Corp · Cybersecurity
Q1 2026 · Updated Apr 2

Executive Summary

Last updated: Apr 2, 2026
76
Citation Health Score
+8 from last quarter

Driven by improved schema coverage and answer-first restructuring on 12 key pages.

Top Win
"What is zero-trust?" prompt

Moved from uncited to Position 1 across ChatGPT and Perplexity after FAQ schema + answer-first restructure.

Emerging Risk
CrowdStrike content surge

CrowdStrike published 8 new pages targeting comparison prompts. Citation share on "vs." queries dropped 15%.

Priority Action
Restructure 5 comparison pages

These pages are losing citations to competitors with better entity clarity and source attribution.

Prompt Landscape Map

78 prompts tracked
Awareness 22 prompts
"What is zero-trust security?"
"What is SIEM?"
"What is endpoint detection?"
"What is threat intelligence?"
+18 more prompts
Comparison 24 prompts
"CrowdStrike vs SentinelOne"
"Best SIEM tools 2026"
"Palo Alto vs Fortinet"
"Top EDR solutions"
+20 more prompts
Cited Losing position Not cited

Citation Persistence Analysis

12-week rolling window
PagePersistenceTrend
acme.com/zero-trust-guide 92% ↑ Stable
acme.com/siem-explained 78% ↑ Improving
acme.com/edr-comparison 45% ↓ Declining
acme.com/threat-intel-101 23% ↓ At risk

Competitor Citation Intelligence

5 competitors tracked
CrowdStrike
34% citation share
↑ +6% this quarter

Aggressive publishing cadence. 8 new pages in Q1 targeting comparison prompts. Strong entity clarity and schema coverage.

SentinelOne
18% citation share
→ Flat

Strong on educational prompts. Weak on comparison queries. No FAQ schema detected on key pages.

Palo Alto Networks
15% citation share
↓ -4% this quarter

Losing ground on awareness prompts. Content is authoritative but poorly structured for AI extraction.

Content Gap & Opportunity Matrix

12 gaps identified
High
"Best SIEM tools 2026"
Current winner: G2.com (comparison table format)
Create a comparison page with structured data, H2 per product, and answer-first opening. Estimated impact: +3 citation positions.
High
"How to implement zero-trust"
Current winner: NIST.gov (authority + schema)
Restructure existing guide with step-by-step HowTo schema. Add primary source citations. Estimated impact: Position 2–3.
Med
"What is XDR vs EDR?"
Current winner: CrowdStrike (entity clarity + freshness)
Publish definitional content with clear entity disambiguation in the first 150 words. Update date visible.

Structural & Formatting Guidelines

Calibrated to cybersecurity vertical
Optimal word count
1,800 – 2,400 words

Pages in this range showed 2.1x citation persistence vs. shorter or longer content in this vertical.

Section length
120 – 180 words per section

AI extracts favor self-contained passages in this range. Each section should answer one question completely.

Heading format
Question-based H2s matching buyer prompts

Pages with prompt-matched H2s showed +54% higher citation rates across Perplexity and ChatGPT.

Schema markup
FAQPage + HowTo on all educational content

3.2x more likely to appear in AI Overviews with FAQPage schema. HowTo schema for procedural content.

Answer placement
Direct answer in the first sentence

44.2% of LLM citations come from the first 30% of the page. Never bury the answer.

Voice & Tone for Citation Persistence

Calibrated to cybersecurity vertical
Confidence signaling
Weak
"Zero-trust might be considered an approach that could potentially improve security posture."
Strong
"Zero-trust is a security framework that eliminates implicit trust and requires continuous verification."
Definitional clarity
Weak
"SIEM is a type of security tool that many organizations use for various purposes."
Strong
"SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) aggregates and analyzes log data from across your infrastructure to detect threats in real time."
Source attribution
Weak
"Studies show that breaches are increasing."
Strong
"According to IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report, the average breach cost rose to $4.88M."

Q2 2026 Action Plan

14 actions · 90-day window
Create "Best SIEM Tools 2026" comparison page
High priority · Gap #1 · Est. impact: +3 positions
Restructure zero-trust implementation guide with HowTo schema
High priority · Gap #2 · Est. impact: Position 2–3
Add FAQ schema to 8 educational pages
High priority · Structural · Est. impact: +3.2x AI Overview appearance
Publish "XDR vs EDR" definitional content
Medium priority · Gap #3 · Target: entity clarity + answer-first
Update publish dates on 12 pages older than 90 days
Medium priority · Freshness · Pages 3x more likely to lose citations after 90 days
Add primary source citations to 5 comparison pages
Medium priority · Attribution · Est. impact: +40–115% visibility

All data shown is illustrative. Your playbook is built from your company's actual citation data.

Every quarter, your playbook gets sharper

The Playbook isn't written once and forgotten. Each quarterly deep-dive adds new longitudinal findings and integrates them directly into the playbook—so your content operations guide is always current.

1

New data analyzed

12 additional weeks of citation data across all prompts and engines. New patterns surface, existing findings get validated or refined.

2

Deep-dive report delivered

A standalone quarterly analysis with new findings, trend shifts, competitor movements, and emerging opportunities specific to your vertical.

3

Playbook updated

New findings are integrated into every relevant chapter. Recommendations get refined. Deprecated tactics are removed. Your SOP stays current.

The result: a compounding advantage

After four quarters, your playbook contains a full year of longitudinal citation intelligence—refined, validated, and specific to your market. Your competitors starting from scratch need a year to build what you already have.

Get a playbook built from your data

Book a call and we'll walk through what your playbook would look like—which chapters apply to your vertical, which prompts we'd track, and what you'd learn in the first 90 days.