Being seen when there's not much yet to see - SEO to AEO for founders

I've been building a launch platform for founders and kept running into the same confusion in conversations: people have heard AEO matters, they're shopping for trackers, and they're about to spend $99-500/month on tools that won't help them.
Here's what I keep seeing.
Every AEO tool on the market (Profound, Gauge, Peec, Scrunch, the rest) is built for a company that already exists. They assume you have a site with real content, traffic for referral data to mean something, and a pipeline to connect visibility to. None of that is true at launch.
If your site has five pages, no schema, no llms.txt, and no off-site mentions, a tracker will just tell you you're invisible. That's an expensive way to learn something you could diagnose for free.
The actual issue is that 80% of what AI systems need from your site is SEO fundamentals. Clean structure. Schema. Entity clarity. Supporting content. Off-site presence. The stuff SEO people have been preaching for fifteen years. There's 20% that's genuinely new (llms.txt, passage-level content structure, the higher weight of community mentions as a retrieval signal), but it sits on top of the fundamentals, not instead of them.
The AEO category has been marketed as a new discipline because that sells tools. "Go do the SEO basics you skipped" doesn't. But that's the actual prescription for most founders launching right now.
What I'd tell someone launching next week:

Set up the fundamentals before you launch. Schema, llms.txt, clean site structure, directory listings. All of it live on day one. AI systems form a sticky picture from first encounter and fixing it later is expensive.
Run a manual audit in week one. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity the five questions your buyer would ask about your category. Google the same questions. Read what comes back. That's your content roadmap for the next month.
Don't buy a tracker. Come back to those tools when you have traffic.
Take the off-site layer seriously. Directory listings aren't busywork. They're the only signal AI and search have before you've earned organic traction.

The measurement tools will still be there when you're big enough to need them. The launch window won't.

Curious if others are seeing the same thing. What's been working for your launch visibility?