CASE STUDY · CONFERENCE AEO SPRINT
CANSO · Airspace World 2026 — how a 3-day aviation conference became a structured AI Knowledge Hub earning citations long after the event ended.
THE CHALLENGE
Airspace World is the world's leading ATM industry conference — three days of expert sessions, keynotes and panels representing the best thinking in aviation governance and air traffic management.
The problem: that expertise lived in PDFs, slide decks and YouTube recordings. None of it was structured for AI retrieval. When buyers asked ChatGPT or Perplexity about ATM innovation, conference sustainability or airspace modernisation, CANSO and Airspace World were invisible — despite being the definitive source on all three.
The Visibility Snapshot confirmed the gap: zero citations across four of the five engines on the core buyer queries we tested. Competitors — mostly consultancy white papers with inferior expertise but better-structured content — were filling the citation slot instead.
THE APPROACH
Week 1
Full citation baseline across 5 engines. Content inventory of all session recordings, speaker bios, theme summaries and published materials. Buyer question research: 120+ queries identified, ranked by volume and strategic importance.
Week 2
47 Q&A pairs drafted, mapped to session content and approved by the CANSO communications team. Each pair written in the answer-formatted structure LLMs retrieve and cite. Schema architecture designed for Event, Speaker, FAQPage and Article types.
Week 3
Answer-ready pages built on the existing Airspace World site infrastructure. JSON-LD schema added to every page. Speaker entities connected to external authority sources. Two rounds of client review and sign-off.
Week 4
Assets live. Distribution playbook handed over: where and how to syndicate content to maximise AI ingestion. 30-day monitoring baseline established.
THE RESULTS
3×
Overall citation rate across the five tracked engines tripled vs. the pre-Sprint baseline. Perplexity and Google AI Overviews moved first — within 10 days of launch.
47
47 structured Q&A pairs covering 8 core themes from the conference. Each one now returns in AI responses to relevant buyer queries.
92%
92% of key pages now carry complete JSON-LD markup — vs. 4% before the Sprint. The 8% gap covers third-party hosted content outside our scope.
#1
CANSO / Airspace World is now the primary cited source for 14 of the 24 ATM and aviation governance queries tested at the 30-day mark.
WATCH
YOUR CONFERENCE NEXT?
Every Conference AEO Sprint starts with a free Visibility Snapshot — 5 minutes, no obligation. We scope the Sprint from there.