SERVICE 01 ／ AEO
Be the source
the Japanese answer is built from.
A Japanese buyer asks an AI assistant a question in Japanese. The answer is assembled from Japanese-language sources. If none of them are yours, you are not in the shortlist that follows — and you will never see the search query that excluded you.
Why are we invisible in Japanese AI answers?
Usually because everything you have published is in English, and what little exists in Japanese is a translated brochure rather than an answer to a question.
Three failure modes account for almost every case we see.
- No Japanese source material
- The assistant has nothing of yours to quote. It quotes your competitors, or a Japanese review site that describes you inaccurately.
- Japanese pages that answer nothing
- Translated marketing copy states positioning but never answers a question. Nothing in it can be lifted out and used as an answer, so nothing is.
- No measurement
- Even where citations are happening, nobody is counting them, so the work cannot be steered and cannot be defended internally.
The third one is the one that kills programmes. Six months in, head office asks what the Japan content budget bought, and there is no number to give them.
SELF-MEASUREDWe tested this on our own site first
Measurements from TRIEDGE’s own Japanese website, not from a client engagement.
Citations by AI in 13 days
340citations
Microsoft Copilot, 16–28 July 2026. Source: Bing Webmaster Tools, AI Performance
Citation share on our own category
50%
Same period and tool
Most-cited single article
54citations
Same period and tool. Highest of any page on our site
What is included, and what is not?
We produce the specification and the measurement. Your team or web partner produces the deployment.
Included
- Content structure
- Question-form headings with a one-sentence answer directly beneath, so each section stands alone as a quotable unit
- FAQ design
- Five questions per page, each answer containing a procedure, a number or a condition. Answers that end in “it depends” do not get cited
- Structured data
- Specification of the schema markup, and verification that what is in the markup is also visible on the page
- Measurement
- Citation count and citation share, a dedicated AI-search channel in your analytics, search console, index notification
- CRM connection
- Wiring the measurement through to HubSpot or Zoho so that a citation can be followed to a pipeline number
Not included
- Website implementation
- HTML, CSS and JavaScript changes are made by your developer or web partner. Quoted separately if you want us to arrange it
- New article writing
- Quoted separately as content production
- Design production
- Quoted separately
- Software licences
- Billed at cost, not marked up
Can we see which Japanese companies arrived from AI search?
Yes, with the AI search visibility option. It adds JPY 100,000 per month, bringing the total to JPY 450,000.
The base package tells you that AI cited you and that traffic followed. The option tells you which companies that traffic belonged to, and lets you match it against your CRM.
For a company entering Japan this is usually the difference between an interesting report and an actionable one. Knowing that 400 people read your Japanese page is not a sales input. Knowing that a specific manufacturer read the comparison page three times in a week is.
The option is not sold on its own. It attaches to the base package.
How does an engagement actually run?
Measurement first, roadmap second, content third. You can stop after the first step and keep everything it produced.
Assessment and measurement setup
Eight-point assessment of the current site, plus setup of AI citation tracking, a dedicated AI-search analytics channel, search console connection and index notification. About 5 hours, roughly one week. JPY 100,000.
Twelve-month roadmap
What to build, in what order, and what each step is expected to move. Agreed before any content work starts.
Structure and content work
Question-form headings, single-sentence answers, FAQ sets, structured data specification. Delivered as instructions your team or web partner implements.
Measure, report, adjust
Monthly reporting in English on citations, citation share, traffic and pipeline. The next month's topics are chosen from that data rather than from opinion.
- Setup
- JPY 100,000 (one-off)
- Monthly
- JPY 350,000 — or JPY 450,000 with AI search visibility
- Minimum term
- 6 months
FAQFrequently asked questions
What clients ask before starting AEO work for Japan.
Q. What is AEO, and how is it different from SEO?
SEO tries to rank a page in a list of search results. AEO tries to get your content quoted inside the answer an AI assistant gives. The difference matters because in an AI answer the user often never clicks anything. So the work shifts: structure the page so a single section can be lifted out and used as an answer, and then measure how often that actually happens.
Q. Why does AEO need to be done in Japanese for the Japanese market?
Because the assistant answers in the language of the question. A Japanese buyer asking Copilot or ChatGPT in Japanese gets an answer assembled from Japanese-language sources. Your English pages are not candidates for that answer, no matter how authoritative they are. This is the single most common reason a well-known global brand is invisible in Japanese AI answers.
Q. What exactly do you deliver each month?
Content structure and FAQ design for the pages in scope, structured data specification, measurement of citations and citation share, a dedicated AI-search channel in your analytics, and CRM connection so that traffic can be traced through to pipeline. Roughly 17.5 hours per month at our standard rate of JPY 20,000 per hour. Reporting is in English.
Q. Do you edit our website yourselves?
No. We specify exactly what to change — which page, which section, what wording, what markup — and your developer or web partner makes the change. This is a deliberate boundary: it keeps us out of your release process and keeps you from depending on us for deployments. If you would prefer us to arrange the implementation, that is quoted separately as web work.
Q. How do we know it is working before enquiries arrive?
Two measurements answer that. Citation count is how often AI assistants quoted your pages. Citation share is what proportion of the pages cited in an answer about your category were yours. Both move months before enquiries do, which is why we report them from month one. The 6-month minimum term exists because this lag is real, not because we want to lock you in.