SAGE for AEO
Setup, Analyze, Generate, Engineer: a practical workflow for measuring and improving answer-engine visibility. Attributed to Josh Blyskal, 2026.
The four steps
Setup is deciding what to track: which prompts, which models, which competitors, at what cadence. Analyze is reading the results for patterns rather than reacting to single answers. Generate is producing or revising content against what the analysis showed. Engineer is the technical and structural work that makes it retrievable.
The order is the contribution. Most AEO work begins at Generate, producing content before establishing a baseline, which makes it impossible to say afterwards whether anything worked.
Why the measurement step comes first
AI answers vary by phrasing, by user and by day. A single observation is anecdote. Only a repeated, fixed set of prompts sampled over time distinguishes a real change from noise.
Setting that up before making changes is the difference between an experiment and a story told after the fact.