Field notes on AI search, AEO, and who AI actually cites. Practical guides, real audit teardowns, and weekly insights for B2B SaaS.
500+ B2B teams readingFrom 'what is AEO' to 'how do I measure it' — the 10 questions every B2B marketer asks when they first encounter AI Engine Optimization, answered straight.
Praveen Maloo·10 min readYou cannot directly edit a generated answer. You can only report it, correct the underlying evidence, and keep testing. Most companies discover this during the incident rather than before it.
Praveen Maloo·6 min readThere are two different pricing problems in AI search. One is that engines can't read your price. The other is worse: they read a price you retired months ago, and quote it to a buyer with total confidence. This post is about the second one.
Praveen Maloo·7 min read✦ THE CITATION ECONOMY
Weekly AEO intel for B2B SaaS teams.
500+ marketers. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Some buyers now research in answer products before a vendor can see any engagement. Ordinary analytics miss that part of consideration entirely — and can't surface inaccurate public information. The Citation Economy is out now on Amazon.
Praveen Maloo·4 min readComplyAdvantage surfaces in 78% of AI discovery prompts for financial crime compliance—a commanding lead in a category with 68 brands. LexisNexis and Dow Jones trail, but the moat isn't unbreakable.
Praveen Maloo·4 min readLangChain surfaces in 82.3% of AI discovery prompts for agent frameworks. The concentration index is 12.2—higher than almost any B2B software category we track.
Praveen Maloo·6 min readCursor owns 78.8% of AI discovery share in coding tools. But Default sits at 66.3% and Tabnine at 62.5% — the gap is 16 points, not 50. And Codeium has the best AEO score in the category at 50/100.
Praveen Maloo·8 min readOnshape holds the #1 shortlist position in 3D & CAD with 24.9% share of voice. Its audit score is 25/100. That gap tells a story about what AI engines reward right now — and what they'll punish later.
Praveen Maloo·4 min readDatabricks surfaces in 80.3% of AI discovery prompts for infrastructure. Snowflake and Pinecone trail at 62% and 58%. The category concentration index is 2.5 — one brand owns the narrative.
Praveen Maloo·3 min readWeaviate, Pinecone, Qdrant, and Milvus are stacked between 91% and 94% in Vector Databases. SecurityScorecard hits 95.5% in Third-Party Risk. DocuSign, Adobe Acrobat Sign, Dropbox Sign, and PandaDoc are all within 1.3 points in eSignature. UiPath runs alone in RPA while Make overtakes Zapier in AI citations. Plus Zoom = Microsoft 365 = Google Workspace in Video Conferencing — to four decimal places.
Praveen Maloo·6 min readMake captures 81.4% of AI discovery prompts in workflow automation. Zapier and Workato follow at 76% and 59%. The concentration is extreme — and vulnerable.
Praveen Maloo·3 min readZoomInfo surfaces in 100% of Sales Intelligence discovery prompts. Salesforce is 67% in CRM, 89% in Marketing Automation, and 100% in ABM. Sales Engagement has three brands within 2.8 points. The week in citation data.
Praveen Maloo·4 min readElastic surfaces in 83% of AI discovery prompts for the AI search category. Perplexity — the product most people associate with 'AI search' — appears in just 26%. The category is not what it looks like from the outside.
Praveen Maloo·10 min readBuilt captures 94.3% of AI discovery share in accounting software — nearly double the runner-up. The concentration is extreme, but one factor could erode it.
Praveen Maloo·4 min readGartner says 75% of B2B buyers now use AI tools during the research phase. What they're doing with those tools — and how it changes which brands make the shortlist — is the central question for B2B marketing in 2026.
Praveen Maloo·4 min readQuickBooks captures 60.4% of AI discovery mentions in accounting software. The audit score is 66/100 — strong, but not dominant. One structural weakness could let a riser break through.
Praveen Maloo·3 min readG2 surveyed 1,076 B2B software buyers in March 2026. The number that should stop every CMO: 69% chose a different vendor than they originally planned because of what AI told them.
Praveen Maloo·6 min readllms.txt is to AI engines what robots.txt is to web crawlers — except instead of telling them what not to read, it tells them exactly what to read first and how to understand your product. It's one of the fastest ways to improve how AI engines describe your brand.
Praveen Maloo·4 min readWithout SoftwareApplication schema, your product homepage is just text to an AI crawler. With it, you're a structured entity with a category, a rating, a price, and a feature list — the kind of data AI engines can quote with confidence.
Praveen Maloo·4 min readOutreach isn't missing from AI answers — it's #2 of 192 in sales engagement, cited in 66% of buyer questions. The problem is how it's cited: hedged, caveated, 'contact sales for pricing.' Its AEO Readiness of 58/100 explains the gap between showing up and being recommended.
Praveen Maloo·6 min readThe highest purchase-intent query pattern in B2B software is '[Brand] vs [Competitor].' When a buyer types that into Perplexity or ChatGPT, the model is looking for a first-party source. If you don't have one, your competitor's page wins by default.
Praveen Maloo·4 min readSalesloft is cited in 65% of sales-engagement buyer questions — #3 of 192 brands, effectively tied with Outreach. But its AEO Readiness sits at 63/100, held back by one thing: the content that would win the consideration phase is locked behind login.
Praveen Maloo·5 min readWhen a B2B buyer asks ChatGPT 'best project management software for remote teams,' your brand either appears — or it doesn't. Most SaaS companies don't even know they're invisible.
Praveen Maloo·4 min readApollo is #2 of 180 brands in AI answers for sales intelligence, cited in 69% of buyer questions, with solid fundamentals. But there's one front where ZoomInfo and Clay still walk away with comparisons Apollo should be winning.
Praveen Maloo·4 min readNotion never set out to dominate AI search. But their community template gallery — thousands of public pages describing specific workflows — turns out to be exactly what AI retrieval engines are looking for.
Praveen Maloo·5 min readWhen you ask any AI 'what's a good CRM for a growing sales team,' HubSpot appears. Every time, on every platform. This isn't luck — it's a machine.
Praveen Maloo·5 min read'How much does [Product] cost?' is one of the most common B2B buying queries. If your pricing page is client-side rendered or contact-gated, the AI's honest answer is: I don't know. And then it recommends a competitor whose pricing it can read.
Praveen Maloo·6 min readWhen a buyer asks Perplexity for 'best CRM for mid-market sales teams,' the model almost always cites G2. Not because G2 paid for placement — but because G2 has the structured, verifiable review data that AI models trust.
Praveen Maloo·6 min read