SaaS buyers increasingly start on ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Brave AI: 'best invoicing software for Indian freelancers', 'Postman alternative with GraphQL support', 'cheapest email marketing tool with API'. If your product is the cited answer, you get discovery for free. If it isn't, you compete on Google alone - slower and more expensive. AEO for SaaS is about engineering your content - especially comparison pages, category-listing pages and cornerstone how-tos - for LLM extraction. The structural advantage for software categories is that these prompts are unusually specific, naming a feature, a price band or an integration, and specific prompts are the ones a well-built comparison page can win outright. The constraint is that assistants cite third-party review and listing sites at least as often as vendor domains, so a serious programme has to work on both surfaces at once.
The prompts SaaS buyers ask LLMs fall into predictable patterns: category searches ('best X'), comparisons ('X vs Y'), feature-specific ('X with GraphQL'), pricing-sensitive ('cheapest X'), geo-specific ('X for Indian businesses'), and integration-specific ('X that integrates with Y'). Each is a content slot - a cornerstone or comparison page that can be engineered for extraction. LLMs weight factual tightness, author credibility (Person schema, named authors with bios), schema coverage, Q&A formatting and direct-answer paragraphs far more than Google does. Recency matters - Perplexity and Brave AI fetch live, so a freshly-published page can cite within 2-4 weeks; ChatGPT and Claude have indexing lag of 4-8 weeks. Citation tracking is the operational discipline: monthly manual and tool-assisted checks against target prompts across the 4 major LLMs, with report on citation-rate, position in source list, and CTR where available.
