AEO API Guide for Custom Reports, Dashboards, and Integrations
If your agency has already set up AEO/GEO tracking, you’ve solved the easy part of metrics reporting. If you haven’t,
Cairrot AEO Tool Review for Agency Users (with Marcus O'Dell)
I just had a working session with Marcus O’Dell (Director of SEO and Analytics at Sentic), an agency-user of Cairrot, along with my AEO developer in order to optimize his Databox integration within Cairrot.
During this conversation, Marcus walked through several areas of Cairrot’s platform, shared useful examples for how he is reporting to his SEO and AEO clients, and shared his honest thoughts about our platform. He did such a thorough job I asked if I could use that portion of our call publicly and he agreed. Thanks, Marcus!
About This Review
- User: Marcus O’Dell
- Company: Sentic
- Account type: Agency
Marcus O’Dell is a respected SEO and Analytics expert and leader with over a decade of experience. Marcus and his team at Sentic are Cairrot’s first approved Garden Partner, which means they’ve been personally vetted by our founding team as a trusted agency for brands looking for an SEO and AEO service guaranteed to deliver results.
About Sentic & Marcus O'Dell
Sentic is a performance marketing agency founded by Ben Otfinoski, with roots in Chicago and a team serving every most global time zones. They specialize in high-velocity digital marketing across AEO, SEO, paid search, paid social, email, and analytics. Their team manages over $250 million in annual Google and Bing ad spend, and they work with brands ranging from e-commerce to healthcare to senior living. Ben, Marcus and the team at Sentic are Cairrot’s first approved Garden Partner, which means they’ve been personally vetted by our founding team as a trusted agency for brands looking for an SEO and AEO service guaranteed to deliver results.
Marcus O’Dell is a respected SEO and Analytics expert with over a decade of experience, and a rising thought leader for for pragmattic AEO.
Sentic is a performance marketing agency founded by Ben Otfinoski, with roots in Chicago and a team serving every most global time zones. They specialize in high-velocity digital marketing across AEO, SEO, paid search, paid social, email, and analytics. Their team manages over $250 million in annual Google and Bing ad spend, and they work with brands ranging from e-commerce to healthcare to senior living. Ben, Marcus and the team at Sentic are Cairrot’s first approved Garden Partner, which means they’ve been personally vetted by our founding team as a trusted agency for brands looking for an SEO and AEO service guaranteed to deliver results.
Marcus O’Dell is a respected SEO and Analytics expert with over a decade of experience, and a rising thought leader for for pragmattic AEO.
Review Highlights
- Sentiment Analysis Dashboard is a client retention tool. Marcus uses Cairrot’s sentiment tracking to flag negative AI associations before they become a problem, turning it into a proactive service for clients.
- Cairrot’s Buyer Profiles get huge reactions. Every client Marcus has shown this feature to has been impressed. It surfaces non-obvious audiences (like social services administrators for senior living facilities shown in the video) that are nearly impossible to reach through paid or organic alone.
- GA4 integration provides AI Traffic Dashboard(s) works without custom setup. Cairrot’s two-click Google integration auto-categorizes LLM referral traffic and pulls historical data. No GA4 configuration required.
- Monthly reporting is the right cadence for AEO. Marcus recommends monthly client walkthroughs rather than weekly, given market volatility and the time it takes to build AI authority.
- The free API enables custom reporting workflows. Marcus pipes Cairrot data into Databox for individual client sub-accounts, making AEO data part of his existing reporting infrastructure.
- Non-technical clients love having access to the platform. Marcus gives clients direct access to Cairrot and reports universally positive reactions, even from people who aren’t tech-savvy.
Table of Contents
How Sentic Manages Multiple Brands with Cairrot's Agency Dashboard
Marcus uses Cairrot’s Agency account, which means he manages multiple client brands from a single interface. When he demos Cairrot to a new client, he starts on the dashboard and walks them through brand visibility, mention sources, and sentiment.
Brand Visibility and Sentiment Analysis in Client Demos
The sentiment analysis feature has become one of Marcus’ go-to talking points in client presentations. He’s found a way to frame it that consistently lands:
“Hey, I mean this feels dystopian, feels like science fiction, but this is how AI feels about you, like what it’s associating you with.”
That framing works because it makes something abstract — how large language models perceive your brand — feel tangible and personal. Clients immediately understand the stakes.
The sentiment phrases view, in particular, has been what Marcus called “a huge hit.” It shows clients the specific language and associations that LLMs are attaching to their brand, which is something most business owners have never seen before.
AI Brand Sentiment Is a Client Retention Tool
Beyond the initial wow factor, Marcus has turned sentiment tracking into a practical retention tool for his agency. When negative sentiment gets flagged, it creates an immediate action item:
“If anything negative gets flagged, we can address that quickly. Like if you see a couple of bad reviews, that’s been a huge value-add that’s played really well.”
This is worth highlighting for other agencies. AEO isn’t just about tracking whether you show up in AI answers. It’s about catching problems early — before a negative association gets baked into an LLM’s understanding of your brand. That kind of proactive monitoring is exactly the type of service that justifies an ongoing retainer.
Organizing AEO Prompts by Category for Client Reporting
Prompt tracking is the core of any AEO strategy, and Marcus has developed a workflow that makes it manageable across multiple clients.
Scaling to 40 Prompts per Client
Marcus mentioned that organizing prompts into categories has been a significant improvement for client comprehension. When you’re tracking 37 or 40 prompts for a single brand, a flat list doesn’t communicate much. Categories give clients a mental framework for understanding where they’re visible and where they’re not.
“Breaking into categories has really helped them visualize, especially as we get more towards closer to the actual 40 prompts.”
For agencies managing AEO across multiple verticals, this is a practical consideration. A senior living facility and an e-commerce brand are going to have completely different prompt categories, and the ability to organize them clearly inside Cairrot saves time in client reporting.
Using Claude for AEO Prompt Suggestions for Each Client
One of the more interesting parts of Marcus’ workflow is how he generates prompt ideas. He’s trained Claude (the LLM, not the Cairrot feature) to suggest which prompts he should be tracking for specific clients:
“It gives the actual categories as well. So what to call them… it’s done really well at picking things they already rank for or they already show up for as well as new opportunities and tells you why.”
This is a power-user move that other agencies can replicate. By feeding Claude context about a client’s industry, services, and target audience, Marcus gets prompt suggestions that are both strategic and grounded in what the client already has visibility for. It saves hours of manual brainstorming and produces better results.
Buyer Profiles
If there’s one feature that consistently gets the strongest reaction in Marcus’ client demos, it’s buyer profiles. His description was blunt:
“People lose their mind at this.”
How Cairrot Generates Buyer Profiles (ICPs) That Surprise Clients with Their Accuracy
Marcus walked through a specific example that illustrates why this feature hits so hard. For a senior living client, Cairrot’s buyer profiles didn’t just surface the obvious audience — adult children looking for care for aging parents. It also identified social services administrators as a key audience:
“It’s not just adult child caregiver but social services administrator. So for a senior living, for example, they need to get referrals and part of that targeting like somebody working in a doctor’s office or something… that’s really hard to do with paid. It’s hard to do with organic. But if they’re using AI to search at work, which they are, this is a good way to get in front of them.”
That’s a meaningful insight. Social services administrators and healthcare professionals are making referral decisions, and they’re increasingly using AI tools to research options during their workday. Traditional paid and organic channels struggle to reach these audiences cost-effectively. AEO opens a new path.
Why Buyer Profiles Matter More for AEO Than Traditional SEO
In traditional SEO, you’re largely constrained to targeting keywords. You can infer audience segments from search intent, but the data doesn’t tell you much about who is actually asking the questions.
AEO is different. Because AI tools are conversational, the prompts people use reveal more about their role, context, and decision-making authority. Cairrot’s buyer profiles translate that into actionable intelligence, showing agencies and their clients exactly which audience segments are most likely to encounter their brand through AI search.
Marcus hasn’t had a single negative reaction to this feature. That’s rare for any SaaS tool.
Competitor Tracking in AI Search
If you’ve been in SEO for any length of time, you’ve had the conversation where a client looks at their competitor report and says, “That’s not our competitor.” Marcus has it in AEO too:
“This is an opportunity. This is who your actual competition is, whether it’s who your business competition is or not.”
Reframing "That's Not Our Competitor" for AI Visibility
The reframe Marcus uses is the same one experienced SEOs have been deploying for years — your business competitors and your search competitors are often two different groups. In AI search, that gap can be even wider. A local senior living facility might be competing for AI visibility against national directories, content publishers, or even government resources that would never show up in a traditional competitive analysis.
For agencies, this is both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is managing client expectations. The opportunity is that AI competitor data often reveals visibility gaps that are easier to close than traditional organic competitors, precisely because most brands aren’t optimizing for AI yet.
Suggested Competitor Reports and Continuous Platform Updates
Marcus also called out Cairrot’s pace of development as something that keeps his team engaged:
“I love logging in seeing something new added, a small thing every day… or sometimes big things.”
The suggested competitor reports feature was one example. For agencies managing multiple accounts, having the platform proactively surface relevant competitors saves research time and occasionally uncovers opportunities that manual analysis would miss.
Heatmap AEO Reports and LLM Analytics
When asked where he spends most of his time in Cairrot, Marcus pointed to the heat map view.
Why Per-Engine Visibility Matters for B2B Clients
Not all LLMs are created equal, and Marcus has found that explaining the differences resonates with clients, especially in B2B:
“Talking them through… the way of like why they’re all different and why Claude is more important, more people are getting there. That’s more especially for B2B.”
This matters because different LLMs serve different audiences. Claude tends to skew toward professional and technical users. ChatGPT has the broadest consumer base. Perplexity attracts research-oriented searchers. For a B2B client, visibility in Claude might be more valuable than visibility in ChatGPT, even if ChatGPT has more total users.
LLM-specific tracking lets Marcus tell that story with data instead of anecdotes.
Tracking ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek
Marcus also noted that tracking DeepSeek, while not always directly relevant to his clients’ strategies, earns credibility:
“You get cool points for having DeepSeek even though it’s not directly relevant. People just think it’s awesome that you also are tracking the Chinese one.”
It sounds like a small thing, but for agencies, perception matters. When a client sees that your analytics tool is tracking six LLMs — including emerging ones — it signals that you’re ahead of the curve. That kind of confidence makes it easier to sell AEO as a service.
Giving Clients Direct Access to Cairrot
Marcus has started giving some clients direct access to the Cairrot dashboard, rather than only showing them data during scheduled meetings.
When to Walk Clients Through vs. Let Them Explore
His approach is practical — always walk them through the platform first before handing over access:
“They loved it… but I always make sure to walk them through first, otherwise you need everything you have here. But some people just are not tech-savvy or this is all new.”
He was also clear that the platform doesn’t need to change to accommodate less technical users:
“I don’t think you need to change anything there. I think it does really well.”
For agencies, this is a meaningful data point. If your AEO tool looks polished enough to put in front of clients (not just use internally) it becomes part of the client experience rather than just a back-end tool. That elevates the perceived value of the service.
GA4 AI Traffic Integration Without Custom Setup
This section is going to matter a lot to agency owners who are currently trying to track AI-driven conversions manually.
Auto-Categorized LLM Referral Traffic in Two Clicks
Cairrot’s GA4 integration connects with two clicks and automatically categorizes LLM referral traffic — without requiring any custom configuration in Google Analytics:
“This client does not have LLM referral tracking set up in GA4… but we can go in there and based on the headers, it automatically makes these groups and stuff for you.”
That’s a significant workflow improvement. Most agencies right now are either not tracking AI traffic at all, or they’re manually setting up custom channel groupings in GA4 to separate ChatGPT referrals from Perplexity referrals from other sources. Cairrot does that automatically.
Auto-Categorized LLM Referral Traffic in Two Clicks
The integration also pulls historical data, which means you don’t have to wait for data to accumulate after connecting a new client:
“If you add a client tomorrow, you can check and see if they got AI conversions last month, two months ago.”
For agencies onboarding new AEO clients, this is the difference between saying “we’ll have data for you next month” and showing them results in the first meeting. It’s a sales tool as much as it is an analytics feature.
API Access, Databox Integration, and Custom Reporting
Marcus is a power user who goes beyond the standard dashboard. He takes advantage of Cairrot’s free API, which is included on every plan, to build custom reporting workflows.
How Sentic Pipes Cairrot Data into Client Sub-Accounts
Sentic uses Databox as their centralized reporting platform, and Marcus has been importing Cairrot data via API into their main agency account. The challenge he’s working through is pushing that data from the main account down to individual client sub-accounts:
“With Databox there’s a lot of native connections… but you can also bring it in through API which is what we’re doing. But when I do that it’s going into the main, like our agency Databox account… finding a better way to then push that to the individual sub accounts.”
This is the kind of workflow challenge that only surfaces when you’re actually running AEO at scale across multiple clients. The fact that Cairrot’s API is free and accessible enough for Marcus to build these integrations — rather than waiting for a native Databox connector — is a meaningful differentiator from competitors that gate API access behind enterprise pricing.
Upcoming Webhooks for Automated Client Reporting
During the conversation, I mentioned that Cairrot is about to release webhooks — which will let agencies set up filters to automatically pipe specific data to specific clients. For example, you could configure a webhook that sends only the domains and URLs relevant to a particular client directly to their reporting dashboard.
Marcus was interested, and for good reason. Webhooks will reduce the manual work involved in managing multi-client AEO reporting, especially for agencies that have already built out their reporting infrastructure around tools like Databox, Looker Studio, or custom dashboards.
WordPress Plugin and Open Source Transparency
Marcus has been using Cairrot’s WordPress plugin and noted several recent additions, including proxy traffic tracking. But the detail that stood out to him was the open-source component:
“It’s not just ‘trust our plugin in front of your infrastructure.'”
Two of Cairrot’s components are available as open-source repositories on GitHub. For agencies that need to vet the tools they install on client websites, and for enterprise clients with strict security requirements, that transparency matters.
We’re also actively investigating a Shopify integration, which Marcus and several other agency partners have flagged as a priority for their e-commerce clients.
How Often Should Agencies Report AEO to Clients?
Marcus recommends monthly reporting for AEO, even though some of his SEO clients are on weekly or biweekly cadences:
“I think for actual reporting I’ve been telling people let’s look at this once a month together just because it’s changing so much up and down, like it’s a volatile market. But also if it’s not changing that much, it takes time to get some of this authority in.”
His approach: give clients access to the dashboard so they can check in anytime, but schedule formal walkthroughs monthly. This prevents over-reporting on natural fluctuations while still maintaining enough touchpoints to demonstrate progress.
“You can look at any time but let’s walk through it together like once a month.”
For agencies building their AEO reporting cadence, this is solid advice. Monthly is frequent enough to catch trends and demonstrate value, but not so frequent that you’re explaining noise.
Final Thoughts on Cairrot as an Agency AEO Tool
Marcus’ overall assessment was clear:
“Your platform looks great… everybody’s had that same reaction… even people that aren’t technical love to kind of nerd out on it because it makes something that everybody knows is important actionable.”
There are plenty of tools that can show you whether your brand appears in AI answers. The difference is whether the data is structured, clear, and useful enough that an agency can build a service around it and put it in front of clients confidently.
Based on this walkthrough, Marcus and the Sentic team are doing exactly that.
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