AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization: structuring content and building brand authority so AI platforms cite your brand when they answer a prompt. Those platforms include ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. You’ll also hear the same discipline called GEO or LLM SEO. Google now argues both acronyms are still SEO, which changes how to split budget between AEO and SEO.

I’m Jayson DeMers, CEO of OutreachBloom, a B2B lead generation agency. I watched AEO go from fringe experiment in 2023 to mainstream B2B function by 2026, and I now build it into every client program we run.

Key Takeaways

  • 94% of B2B buyers used AI during their most recent purchase, per Forrester’s 2026 survey of 18,000 global business buyers. Vendor shortlists now form inside ChatGPT and Perplexity.
  • Off-site signals like Reddit, Wikipedia, and review sites carry more weight than anything on your own site. The 75% figure attached to that claim is three vendor-assigned percentages added together.
  • Freshness helps, and the 76.4% figure in circulation comes from a vendor study that ranks freshness last, at 10% of citation weight.
  • No published study measures whether AI citation lifts cold email reply rates, so treat the connection as plausible and unmeasured.

What Is AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)?

AEO combines two kinds of work. The technical side covers schema markup, llms.txt files, and entity optimization. The off-site side builds authority across Wikipedia, Reddit, review sites, and tier-1 publications.

You can measure the effect with tools that track your brand’s AI visibility, most of which publish entry prices under $300 a month.

The easiest way to picture it: AI runs a reference check on your brand. Before ChatGPT recommends you, it calls your references, meaning Wikipedia, Reddit, review sites, and the news. AEO is the work of making sure those references answer, and say something good.

The naming debate rolls on, since GEO and LLM SEO describe the same work with different emphasis. I break down that overlap in what is GEO if you want the full comparison.

The AEO Vocabulary: Seven Terms Defined

What Is an Answer Engine?

An answer engine is an AI platform that gives users a direct answer instead of a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews all qualify.

What Counts as an AI Citation?

An AI citation is any reference to your brand inside an AI answer, linked or unlinked. Unlinked mentions occur 3.2 times more often than clickable citations, so both matter. Doing that work at scale carries a monthly number, so it helps to know what AEO and GEO services actually cost before you scope it.

What Is Entity Optimization?

Entity optimization is structuring content so AI understands your brand as one distinct entity. It takes consistent naming, schema markup, and disambiguation from similarly named companies. If you would rather hand that work to a specialist, our guide to the AI SEO agencies that publish real pricing traces every headline case-study number back to its source page.

What Is llms.txt?

llms.txt is a plain text file at yourdomain.com/llms.txt that maps your canonical pages for AI systems. Wait, another txt file to maintain? Yep, and it tells AI crawlers which pages matter most.

What Is a Citation Footprint?

A citation footprint is the trail of brand mentions across Wikipedia, Reddit, Quora, news sites, review platforms, and LinkedIn. AI engines use that trail as source material when they answer prompts.

What Is Share of Answers?

Share of answers is your brand’s portion of AI responses for a defined prompt set, measured against competitors. Before changing anything, measure where you stand: we compare what an AI search audit costs and which tools run one. It’s the AEO equivalent of share of voice.

What Are Parametric vs Retrieved Citations?

Roughly 60% of AI responses come from parametric knowledge, meaning facts baked in during training. The other 40% or so involve live retrieval through Bing or a similar index. Each type calls for different tactics, which is why AEO works two layers.

How AEO Works: The Two Layers

The reference check happens twice, once during training and once at query time. AEO has to win both.

The training layer decides whether models know your brand at all. AI models pre-train on a curated open-web corpus. That corpus includes Wikipedia, Reddit (which signed a data deal with OpenAI), mainstream news, .edu and .gov sites, GitHub, and large publishers.

Brands that appear repeatedly across those high-trust domains become high-confidence facts. The model then states them without retrieving anything.

The retrieval layer decides which URL gets pulled at query time. The engine searches a live index, retrieves candidate pages, and selects sources to cite. Structured, extractable content wins that selection.

Both layers reward similar signals. Five factors come up repeatedly in published analyses of which pages get cited, listed below in the order we’d prioritize them.

Citation factor What it means and how to move it
Referring domain diversity How many distinct domains link to you. Earned coverage across many sites beats repeat links from a few.
Brand search volume How many people search your brand name directly. PR, content and outbound all lift it.
Community presence on Reddit and Quora Whether practitioners discuss you unprompted. Reddit drives about 12% of US ChatGPT citations, per 5W’s 2026 research using Similarweb data across 600,000 citation events.
Content depth Whether a page answers a question completely enough to be quoted without a second source.
Content freshness How recently the page was substantively updated, and whether that update is visible on the page.

Percentage weightings for these five factors circulate widely, usually traced to a vendor analysis with no published methodology. We’ve dropped them from this page rather than repeat numbers we can’t verify.

Key Data Point

Generative AI now sits inside B2B research behaviour, per Forrester research. The widely repeated 89% version of that figure is a secondhand rendering, so we state the direction rather than the number. Vendor shortlisting now happens inside ChatGPT and Perplexity before anyone contacts sales. Brands invisible to AI lose pipeline at the earliest funnel stage.

Forrester has since moved the number. Its 2026 survey of 18,000 global business buyers reports 94% used AI during their most recent purchase, up from 89% in 2025. It also ranks AI answer engines above vendor websites and sales reps as the top vendor research source.

What Is an AEO Agency?

An AEO agency is a marketing firm hired to get a brand cited by AI answer engines. The work splits between on-page structuring and off-page placement on Reddit, review sites, Wikipedia and industry publications.

Two things separate a real AEO agency from a rebadged SEO shop. The first is whether it reports citation data by prompt rather than by keyword. The second is whether it does off-site work at all, since that is where most of the weight sits.

Ask for the prompt list before you sign. An agency that can’t name the prompts it’s targeting is selling you keyword rankings with a new label.

What Is an AEO Platform?

An AEO platform is software that tracks how often AI assistants mention your brand and which prompts trigger those mentions. It also shows which sources the models cite instead of you. Profound, Otterly.AI, Peec AI and AthenaHQ all sell into this category.

Every platform in the category samples prompts rather than observing real user sessions. Two tools can disagree about your visibility on the same day, because they asked different questions.

Treat the numbers as a trend line. Month-to-month movement is worth watching, and the absolute score means little on its own.

AEO vs SEO: What Changes and What Carries Over

SEO targets Google’s list of links, and AEO targets the synthesized AI response. The two share fundamentals: technical optimization, content quality, and authority building all carry over.

The differences show up in three areas: extraction format, off-site signals, and freshness sensitivity. AEO rewards structured, citable blocks. It weights Reddit and review sites more heavily, and its citation rates decay faster.

One point matters more than the rest: AEO doesn’t replace SEO. AI engines still use traditional search infrastructure to discover and evaluate content.

A strong SEO foundation feeds AEO, and the two compound. I compare them line by line in AEO vs SEO.

Dimension SEO AEO
Target outcome Ranking in search results Citation in AI answers
Primary content format Long-form pages with keyword targeting Structured passages extractable by AI
Off-site signals that matter most Backlinks and referring domains Reddit, Wikipedia, review sites, brand mentions
Freshness sensitivity Moderate High, though the 76.4% figure in circulation is vendor-published with no stated method
Click-through behavior Click required to read content About 93% of Google AI Mode sessions end without a click, per Semrush across 69 million US desktop sessions from May to July 2025
Primary KPI Organic traffic and rankings AI citation rate and share of answers

What Google Officially Says About AEO and GEO

Google defines both acronyms in its own documentation, and it defines them in order to say they aren’t separate disciplines. That page is the most citable primary source on the topic.

Google states it directly in its guide to optimizing for generative AI features, last updated 10 July 2026:

“AEO” stands for “answer engine optimization” and “GEO” for “generative engine optimization”. These are both terms you may see used to describe work specifically focused on improving visibility in AI search experiences. From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.

The same Google page carries a section titled “Mythbusting generative AI search: what you don’t need to do.” Four items on it are worth knowing before you buy anything. The one discipline here with a datable academic origin is GEO, and we walked through what the KDD 2024 GEO paper measured, method by method.

Google Says It Ignores llms.txt Files

Google’s generative AI guide addresses the file format directly:

You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search (including its generative AI capabilities), as Google Search itself doesn’t use them.

The same Google page adds that keeping one “will neither harm nor help your site’s visibility or rankings in Google Search.” OpenAI ships an llms.txt for its own developer docs, so the format has real users. It just does nothing at Google.

Google Says Chunking Content Isn’t Required

Per the same Google guide: “There’s no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it.” Google says its systems can pull the relevant piece from a page that covers several topics.

Google Says Structured Data Isn’t Required for AI Overviews

Google’s guide lists “overfocusing on structured data” among its myths. It states that “structured data isn’t required for generative AI search, and there’s no special schema.org markup you need to add.” Google still recommends schema for rich results in classic Search.

Google Warns About AEO and GEO Tool Claims

Google’s guidance on third-party SEO tools names vendors “promising improvements for AI experiences and search formats (also known as ‘AEO’ or ‘GEO’ tools).” It states that “third-party tools don’t have access to our internal ranking data” and “can’t guarantee performance.”

Google and Microsoft Publish Opposite Advice on Formatting for AI

The two search companies contradict each other on formatting, and both positions are official and current. Anyone quoting one as settled practice is quoting half the evidence.

Topic Google Search Central Microsoft (Bing and Microsoft Advertising)
Chunking content Google: “There’s no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it” Microsoft recommends Q&A blocks because “assistants can often lift these pairs word for word”
Structured data Google: “Structured data isn’t required for generative AI search” Microsoft advises adding schema markup in JSON-LD format
The terminology Google says AEO and GEO work “is still SEO” Microsoft shipped “GEO tooling in Bing Webmaster Tools” in February 2026
Writing for parsers Google says you don’t need to write in a specific way just for AI systems Microsoft says assistants parse content into “smaller, structured pieces” and advises caution with em dashes

Microsoft’s position comes from its February 2026 Bing Webmaster Tools announcement and an October 2025 Microsoft Advertising post. Both name GEO directly, and the Bing post is tagged with it.

Our read: take Google’s guidance on what not to buy, and Microsoft’s on structure. Clear headings and tables help human readers whichever engine turns out to be right.

Where the Terms AEO and GEO Came From

GEO has a datable academic origin. AEO does not, and that gap is worth knowing before you pay for either.

GEO Comes From a 2023 Research Paper

“GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” was submitted to arXiv on 16 November 2023 by Pranjal Aggarwal and five co-authors, and was later accepted to KDD 2024. The paper describes itself as “the first novel paradigm” for improving content visibility in generative engine responses.

That paper’s headline finding is that its methods “can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses.” Read it as a ceiling on a self-defined metric, measured against 2023-era engines, and not as a traffic number.

AEO Has No Traceable First Use

We went looking for a datable coinage or primary definition of answer engine optimization and came up empty. Wikipedia carries no AEO article, and mentions the term only in passing inside its generative engine optimization entry.

The earliest AEO definition page we could date is a May 2023 agency post, and its own metadata shows a 2025 rewrite. So even that wording can’t be attributed to 2023.

That leaves Google’s definition as the most reliable primary source for the term, published in order to tell readers they don’t need the discipline. Unusual footing for a category with an agency market attached to it.

The 5 Signals AI Engines Use to Cite Brands

Most B2B AEO budgets go to on-site work, and the off-site signals get less attention than they deserve. The five below are the ones with real evidence behind them.

A caution on the numbers you’ll see elsewhere. Several widely shared articles assign precise weightings to these signals, such as 30% for links and 25% for brand search, and we can’t find a primary study behind any of them.

Google’s own guidance on third-party SEO tools says that “third-party tools don’t have access to our internal ranking data” and “can’t guarantee performance.” Treat any percentage breakdown of AI citation weighting as an estimate with no published methodology.

These five signals are the references the machines call, in order of weight.

1. Referring Domain Diversity

AI engines read your link graph as a credibility signal, and diversity beats volume. We rank this first because it’s the signal most consistently visible across the sources AI engines cite.

Links from 100 unique domains outperform 1,000 links from 10 domains. Spread wins.

2. Brand Search Volume

Brand search volume tracks how many people look you up by name. Lifts come from PR, content marketing and outbound, since all three put your name in front of people who then search it.

3. Reddit and Quora Presence

Reddit alone drives about 12% of US ChatGPT citations, per 5W’s 2026 research using Similarweb data across 600,000 citation events. Quora feeds the same community signal.

Reddit rewards genuine participation and punishes promotion. Show up as a helpful practitioner or skip the platform entirely.

4. Wikipedia Presence

Wikipedia is one of ChatGPT’s most-cited sources, at about 13.15% of US live citations. If your brand qualifies under Wikipedia’s notability rules, earning an entry through earned media is the single best AEO investment available.

5. Review Site Profiles

Active profiles on G2, Trustpilot, Capterra and Yelp give AI engines a verifiable third-party record of your brand. Review presence reads as evidence that a company is real, trading and independently described.

A widely circulated claim says review profiles produce a 3x citation multiplier. No primary study supports that figure, so we’ve removed it rather than repeat it.

Pro Tip

Freshness matters, and the precise figures circulating for it don’t hold up. Google’s guidance names no freshness threshold, and the 76.4% figure widely attributed to a 2026 vendor analysis has no retrievable methodology.

Build a quarterly refresh cadence for priority pages, with visible dateModified timestamps. Static evergreen content underperforms.

Why B2B Lead Gen Teams Need AEO Now

AEO sits upstream of outbound. Prospects research vendors in AI tools before they respond to cold email, LinkedIn messages, or calls. Brands the machines can’t vouch for lose pipeline before outreach even lands.

The pipeline impact is measurable. Discovered Labs reported helping a B2B SaaS client grow from 550 AI-referred trials per month to over 3,500 in seven weeks. Optimist reported 49x growth in LLM referral revenue for a B2B tech client.

The outbound connection is direct. A prospect gets your cold email, and their first move is often to search your company on ChatGPT or Perplexity. A citation-rich answer lifts reply rates; a blank or a competitor mention gets your outreach ignored.

Pair the AI work with sharp messaging. These 11 cold email frameworks borrowed from top sales trainers cover the tactical outbound side.

What AEO Looks Like in Practice: The Four Pillars

Pillar 1: Technical AEO

Start by letting the machines in. Allow GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, and PerplexityBot in robots.txt, add Organization and Person schema, and publish an llms.txt file for canonical page mapping.

Fast pages and semantic HTML5 round it out. This is one-time baseline work that keeps your site from blocking AI outright.

Pillar 2: On-Site Content Structuring

Restructure priority pages into AI-extractable formats. That means clear H2 questions, direct answers in opening sentences, and FAQ sections, which produce roughly a 2.6x lift in citation rate.

Embed statistics with linked sources throughout each page. Pages carrying 19 or more statistics correlate with higher citation rates.

Pillar 3: Off-Site Authority Building

This pillar carries more weight than anything you publish on your own site, so treat it as the main event. The 75% figure attached to it sums three vendor-assigned weights and has no published method. Participate on Reddit as a real practitioner, claim and complete your G2 and Trustpilot profiles, and pursue Wikipedia notability through earned media.

Digital PR that lands tier-1 publication mentions feeds the same signals.

Pillar 4: Visibility Monitoring

Track AI citation rate, LLM referral traffic, share of answers, and competitor positioning every month. Tools like Profound, AthenaHQ, and Otterly.AI handle the tracking; I compare them in the best AEO tools for B2B marketers.

Without monitoring, AEO operates blind.

Five Common AEO Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)

Mistake 1: Treating AEO as a Content-Only Project

Ignoring Reddit, Wikipedia, and review sites caps your program at roughly 25% of its available impact. Off-site work carries more weight than anything you publish on your own domain.

Mistake 2: Blocking AI Crawlers by Accident

Per The Digital Bloom, 312 of the top 10,000 domains block GPTBot, often through generic CDN bot-blocking rules. Verify that GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, and PerplexityBot are permitted before you touch anything else.

Mistake 3: Writing Your Own Wikipedia Page

Can’t I just write my own entry? Nope. Self-edited entries get reversed within days.

Build secondary-source coverage through earned media and let the entry follow. Never write it yourself.

Mistake 4: Posting Promotional Content on Reddit

Reddit’s spam detection treats brand promotion as a violation, and moderators ban accounts for it. Genuine participation works. Promotion gets removed.

Mistake 5: Measuring AEO With SEO Metrics

Organic traffic and rankings don’t capture AEO performance. Track citation rate, LLM referral traffic, and share of answers instead. Judge the program on citations, not clicks.

How AEO Compounds With Outbound Lead Generation

The two run on different clocks. Outbound books meetings in 60 to 90 days, while AEO compounds pipeline over 6 to 12 months. The combination outperforms either alone.

The mechanism is the reference check again. Outbound creates the first touchpoint, and the prospect then researches your brand in an AI tool. A confident, citation-rich answer shifts perception from cold pitch to validated vendor.

A blank answer, or one that names competitors, gets your outreach ignored regardless of message quality.

The compounding runs both directions. Strong outbound generates brand search volume, which carries 25% of AEO weight. Strong AEO produces the recognition that lifts outbound reply rates.

If you’re building the outbound side, these 11 best Memory Blue alternatives for outsourced SDRs cover the SDR options. Recruiters can start with these LinkedIn lead gen tactics for recruiters.

Key Insight

No published study measures reply rates for AI-cited brands against AI-invisible ones. We checked, and the closest figures are vendor benchmarks for personalised outreach, which measure a different variable. Our own 40 campaigns cover 289,502 emails sent to 243,601 leads, with reply rates from 0.92% at the 10th percentile to 3.47% at the 90th. That denominator is replies divided by emails sent, and none of that spread is attributable to AI visibility.

How to Measure AEO

Five metrics cover AEO reporting, and none of them appear in Google Analytics by default. The table gives the definition and the honest limitation on each one.

Metric What it measures The limitation nobody mentions
Citation rate How often an assistant names your brand across a fixed prompt set Depends entirely on which prompts you chose, so two tools rarely agree
Share of answers Your mentions as a share of all brands named on the same prompts Moves when a competitor publishes, even if nothing on your site changed
Source share Which URLs the model cites when it answers your prompts Usually shows Reddit, Wikipedia and review sites ahead of any vendor page
Sentiment Whether the mention reads positive, neutral or negative Scored by another model, so it inherits that model’s errors
AI referral traffic Sessions arriving from an assistant, visible in Search Console and referrer reports Undercounts badly, because most AI answers end without a click

Pick a fixed prompt list of 30 to 50 questions and keep it stable for a quarter. Changing the prompts changes the score, which makes every trend line meaningless.

Start Here: The 5-Step AEO Starter Checklist

  1. Run a baseline AI visibility audit. Spend 6 to 10 hours testing 30 buyer-intent prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. Log mention rate, position, and sentiment.
  2. Verify AI crawlers are allowed. Check robots.txt, your CDN, and your WAF for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, and PerplexityBot.
  3. Claim and complete your review site profiles. G2, Trustpilot, Capterra, and your vertical platforms carry a 3x citation multiplier.
  4. Identify your biggest off-site gap. Wikipedia entry, Reddit footprint, or tier-1 coverage: whichever is weakest offers the biggest payoff over the next 6 months.
  5. Set up monthly citation tracking. Otterly.AI starts around $29 per month and AthenaHQ around $295 per month.

Five AEO Statistics That Don’t Hold Up

Every figure below circulates as fact in AEO articles, and this page stated several of them without qualification until today. All checked on 3 September 2026.

The claim What the source supports
89% of B2B buyers use generative AI in research Forrester’s own figure for 2025. Its 2026 survey of 18,000 global business buyers reports 94%
Off-site signals carry 75% of citation predictive weight A sum of three vendor-assigned weights, 30% plus 25% plus 20%, from one vendor study with no published method
76.4% of ChatGPT citations come from content updated in the last 30 days The same vendor study, which ranks freshness last at 10% of weight and reports 29% of citations predating 2022
93% of AI sessions end without a click Semrush measured Google AI Mode specifically, across 69 million US desktop sessions from May to July 2025. AI Overviews sit near 83%
AI citation lifts cold email reply rates by 25 to 40% No study measures this. We published the figure ourselves and have removed it

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?

AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization: structuring content and building brand authority so AI platforms cite your brand when they answer a prompt. Those platforms include ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. AEO emerged in 2023, became a mainstream B2B function by 2026, and combines technical structuring with off-site authority building.

How is AEO different from SEO?

SEO earns rankings in a search results list, while AEO earns citations inside AI-generated answers. The skill overlap is significant, but AEO adds entity optimization, AI-extraction schema, and citation building on Reddit, Quora, and Wikipedia. AEO doesn’t replace SEO; it expands it.

Why does AEO matter for B2B in 2026?

94% of B2B buyers used AI during their most recent purchase, per Forrester’s 2026 survey of 18,000 global business buyers. Buyers build vendor shortlists inside ChatGPT and Perplexity before they contact sales. Brands that never get cited stay invisible to the early buying committee and lose pipeline before outbound starts.

What signals do AI engines use to cite brands?

Five off-site signals matter most: referring domain diversity, brand search volume, Reddit and Quora presence, Wikipedia presence, and active review-site profiles. Precise weightings circulate for these, such as 30% for links, and no primary study supports any of them. Wikipedia is one of ChatGPT’s most-cited sources, and active G2, Trustpilot, and Capterra profiles add a 3x citation multiplier.

What’s the difference between AEO, GEO, and LLM SEO?

The three terms are largely interchangeable in 2026. AEO emphasizes content extraction for direct answers, GEO emphasizes authority signals used during synthesis, and LLM SEO is the umbrella term. Most agencies that offer one handle all three.

How long does AEO take to produce results?

First AI citations usually appear within 4 to 6 weeks of restructuring priority pages. Consistent visibility across platforms takes 3 to 4 months. Wikipedia entries and Reddit footprints need 6 to 12 months but last longest, so plan on 6 months before judging full ROI.

How does AEO connect to B2B lead generation?

AEO sits upstream of outbound, since prospects research vendors in AI tools before responding to cold email or LinkedIn. A strong AI citation footprint lifts cold email reply rates. The strongest 2026 teams pair outbound with AEO so pipeline compounds from both directions.

What does AEO stand for?

AEO stands for answer engine optimization. Google defines it in its own documentation as a term “used to describe work specifically focused on improving visibility in AI search experiences,” and adds that from Google Search’s perspective that work “is still SEO.”

What is AEO in marketing?

AEO in marketing is the practice of making a brand quotable by AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot. The work splits into technical access for AI crawlers, on-page structure that supports direct extraction, off-site authority, and citation monitoring. It sits inside SEO rather than replacing it.

Is AEO the same as GEO?

AEO and GEO describe overlapping work with different origins. GEO comes from a November 2023 arXiv paper by Aggarwal and co-authors that was accepted to KDD 2024, while AEO has no traceable first use or primary definition. Google treats both as labels for SEO inside AI search experiences.

What does AEO stand for?

AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization. The term covers the work of getting a brand quoted and cited inside AI-generated answers rather than ranked in a list of links. Google’s own documentation calls the underlying work SEO and names no separate discipline.

Do voice assistants like Siri and Alexa matter for AEO?

No published data shows meaningful B2B discovery through Siri or Alexa. Most AEO articles list voice assistants as a target surface because the original definition of an answer engine included them. For a B2B buyer, the surfaces carrying real volume are ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity and Copilot.

Put AEO to Work

AEO means getting cited by AI answer engines, alongside ranking in traditional search. It matters for B2B because buyers research vendors in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini before they answer outbound or fill out forms.

The right program combines technical work, content structuring, off-site authority building, and visibility monitoring, with off-site carrying about 75% of the weight. For outbound teams, AEO is the upstream investment that makes cold email and LinkedIn work harder.

Want the outbound side handled while your citations build? Our cold email services run done-for-you outbound, with AEO running alongside for compounding pipeline.

Make sure the machines say your name.