Onsite + owned
Make the truth unmistakable.
Clarify product pages, comparisons, use cases, research, documentation, and expert content so every part of your story supports the same conclusion.
The Storyline Method
For AI to recommend you, it must understand you.
And to understand you, AI needs a clear, coherent story. No contradictions. No missing chapters. No confusion about who you are, what you do, or why you matter.
The problem with short-term AEO
Buying queries are the outcome. They are not the whole strategy.
Many AEO providers focus only on bottom-of-funnel questions: the prompts closest to a purchase. That can create quick wins, but it only scratches the surface.
Whether AI recommends you in those moments is the downstream effect of many upstream signals being clear, consistent, and credible.
Visible result
AI recommends your brand in a buying conversation.
The upstream system
Who you serve
What you sell
What makes you different
Which problems you solve
Where you have authority
Why buyers should trust you
From brand truth to AI belief
Start with the story. Then close the gaps.
We compare the brand story you want AI and your customers to believe with the story AI tells today. The difference between the two becomes the roadmap.
01
Define
Write the story you want the market to understand.
We begin with your source of truth: the clear, coherent story you want AI and your customers to believe about your brand, products, expertise, and point of view.
02
Diagnose
Learn what AI believes about you today.
We review how AI describes every important facet of your brand and product suite, then compare those answers with the story you actually want to tell.
03
Prioritize
Turn belief gaps into a focused roadmap.
We identify where the story is missing, vague, outdated, or inconsistent. Then we rank the gaps by their influence on discovery, trust, and buying decisions.
04
Correct
Build the evidence that changes the answer.
We systematically correct those gaps across your website, owned channels, and the independent sources AI uses to verify what is true.
Correct the full information environment
Your site is the source of truth. It cannot be the only source.
When AI is confused, your owned channels should provide a definitive answer. But AI also looks for independent evidence before it trusts and repeats that answer.
Offsite + independent
Give AI reasons to believe it.
Strengthen the third-party sources, citations, mentions, and expert validation that help AI verify your claims instead of treating them as marketing copy.
Move fast
Long-term thinking does not mean slow execution.
We move quickly from diagnosis to action. No six-week kickoff. No strategy deck that sits untouched. We find the clearest gap, ship the work, and use the result to sharpen the next move.
Report monthly
Measure whether the story is changing.
Every month, we report on the work shipped, the gaps closed, how AI's answers are changing, and where your brand is gaining visibility. Then we set the next priorities.
Move fast. Think long. Build a brand story AI can understand and trust.
Talk through your brand storyA manifesto from the founder
I would rather build the story than rent the answer.
I move fast. That's usually the first thing clients notice, and it's what I'd want to know if I were the one hiring. But speed isn't the interesting part. What I point it at is.
Most AEO providers think in weeks. They find the handful of buying questions sitting closest to a credit card, the best-tool-for-X and top-vendors-in-Y prompts, and they go chase mentions there. It works, sort of. You'll see movement. I understand the appeal, too, because those wins are easy to screenshot and drop into a report.
But that's the surface. And it's sitting on top of something much bigger that almost nobody bothers to look at.
For AI to recommend you, it has to understand you. And to understand you, it needs a story from you that holds together. One story. Not eleven half-versions scattered across your website, your docs, your review profiles, a podcast you did two years ago, and a competitor comparison page that describes you wrong.
Whether you win the buying conversation is a downstream effect. It's the output of dozens of upstream things being clear, consistent, and verifiable. If who you serve is fuzzy, if your product suite gets described three different ways in three different places, if the thing that makes you different lives only in your head and your sales calls, no amount of query targeting fixes that. You'll rent a few wins and then wonder why they never compound.
So I start somewhere else. I ask AI about you first, and not just the buying prompts. Every facet: who you serve, what you sell, what you're genuinely good at, which problems you solve, why anyone should trust you. I write down what it says. Then I put that next to the story you want AI and your customers to believe. Two documents, side by side.
The space between them is the work. That gap is the roadmap, and it usually surprises people. It's rarely a content-volume problem. It's more often that AI thinks you compete with a company you don't, or has no idea you serve enterprise, or is still repeating positioning you abandoned two years ago.
Then we close those gaps deliberately, hardest-hitting first, and always on two fronts. Your site and your owned channels are the source of truth. When AI is unsure about you, that's where it should be able to go and get a straight answer: current, specific, impossible to misread. But your own website is never enough, and pretending otherwise is why a lot of this work quietly fails. AI looks for corroboration from sources you don't control, so we work offsite too, on the third-party mentions and citations and independent evidence that turn your claim into something AI treats as a fact.
Then every month I report on all of it. What shipped, which gaps closed, how AI's answers changed, and where they stubbornly didn't. You should never have to wonder what I've been doing.
That's the whole method. I'd rather spend a year making your story unmistakable than a month renting you three answers.
Talk soon,
Mike Hinckley
Founder, Storyline
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
- It is a long-term AEO system for shaping how AI understands, verifies, and recommends your brand. We start with the coherent story you want the market to believe, compare it with what AI says today, prioritize the gaps that matter most, and then correct those gaps across your owned channels and the independent sources AI uses to check claims.
Build the story AI should know
Find the gap between what AI believes and what you want it to believe.
We will show you where your brand story breaks down and the fastest way to start correcting it.