In eevee, you can control the size of the AO. This is nice, but you can’t bake AO in eevee, you need to go to Cycles, where you can’t control this. And, for me, everything come out looking really dark.
SOLVED: Rather than baking AO, use an AO node into a emit node and then you can controll the size and bake the emmission.
I also have a meathod for denoising my bakes: Once I’ve baked both AO and Normal maps, I use the compositor to denoise.
If you bake the AO directly, there actually is a way to control the distance. In your render settings, you go to:
light paths → fast gi approximation.
That feature replaces bounce light with AO for faster render times. The AO bake will respond to the distance in that tab.
Cheers! That looks like a simpler alternative.