Case Study — Iris Digital Consulting
By Sam Wudel, Founder of Iris Digital Consulting
From 47.2 to 71.6 in 3 days.
We ran AEO on ourselves before we ran it on anyone else. Here is exactly what we did and what moved.
Where we started
March 31, 2026
Overall score
47.2
AI Citability
37
Brand Authority
42
Content E-E-A-T
39
Technical GEO
71
Schema & Data
48
Platform Optimization
63
When we audited irisaeo.com on March 31st, the site had no schema markup, no structured data, no llms.txt, and no multi-page crawling in our audit pipeline.
We were invisible to AI. None of the six platforms we track — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI, Gemini, Copilot, or Claude — were citing our business by name.
The results
April 3, 2026 — 3 days later
24.4
point overall gain
3
days to implement
6
pillars improved
Every action we took
Schema & Structured Data
Deployed a complete JSON-LD schema stack — Organization, LocalBusiness with geo coordinates, Person schemas for Sam Wudel and Miles Chamberlain, WebPage, WebSite, Service nodes for each offering, and FAQPage.
Result: Schema & Data +26 points
Security Headers
Added Content-Security-Policy, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy, and Permissions-Policy via vercel.json. These are trust signals that AI platforms and search engines use to verify a site is legitimate.
Result: Technical GEO +23 points
Multi-Page Audit Pipeline
Rebuilt our audit system to crawl up to 5 pages per audit instead of only the homepage. E-E-A-T signals, citability blocks, and content signals are now collected across the entire site.
Result: Content E-E-A-T +56 points
About Page with Expertise Signals
Created a dedicated about page with founder bios, methodology documentation, and credential signals. This gave the audit system real expertise and authoritativeness signals.
Result: Content E-E-A-T compound effect
LCP Performance Fix
Identified and removed a full-page Framer Motion animation that was blocking the browser from painting the hero. Deferred smooth scroll initialization. Lighthouse Performance jumped from 72 to 96.
Result: Platform Optimization 63 → 100
llms.txt and AI Crawler Configuration
Created llms.txt at the domain root. Updated robots.txt to explicitly allow GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and other AI crawlers.
Result: Technical GEO compound effect
Citability Scorer Recalibration
Discovered our citability scoring algorithm was penalizing short direct-answer content. Recalibrated to reward 40-80 word direct-answer blocks. Optimal passages: 0 → 4.
Result: AI Citability +9 points
If we did this for ourselves in 3 days, imagine what we do for you in 90.
This case study is our proof of concept. Every action we took on irisaeo.com is the same methodology we apply to our clients.
Iris Digital Consulting works with businesses across the US. We audit your AI visibility, fix what AI can't read, and track your citations every month.
Want to learn more about who we are or how our process works?