The AEO Guide
Last updated: May 16, 2026 · SG Systems PTE. LTD.
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of getting your brand cited, mentioned and recommended inside AI-generated answers — the response a user reads in ChatGPT, Claude or a Google AI Overview, often without ever clicking a blue link.
Why AEO now
High-intent buyers increasingly ask an AI assistant before they scan a list of links. If the assistant answers the question inline and names a competitor, the ranking page never gets the visit — and never gets the sale. Being the answer is the new channel.
AEO vs SEO
SEO optimises for being clicked in a list. AEO optimises for being the answer. They overlap — structured, well-sourced content helps both — but the signals, metrics and tactics differ. AEO cares about how engines synthesise and attribute, not just where you rank.
The signals that matter
- Crawlability for AI agents — your robots.txt should allow GPTBot, ClaudeBot and other AI crawlers; a valid llms.txt helps retrieval engines understand your site. See the llms.txt spec.
- Structured answers — tables, lists, bold key facts, and a one-sentence answer immediately under each H2. AI engines preferentially cite densely-structured pages.
- Entities & schema — clean JSON-LD (Organization, FAQPage, Product) makes your brand and facts machine-resolvable. See the schema cheatsheet.
- Citations & sources — engines build answers from a small set of high-authority URLs. Getting referenced where they already look matters more than raw backlinks.
- Sentiment — being cited is good; being cited positively is essential.
How AnswerRank helps
AnswerRank audits the technical signals (robots.txt, llms.txt, JSON-LD entities), X-rays your formatting density against the page beating you, flags pages losing clicks to AI Overviews via Search Console, tracks your money prompts across major AI engines, maps the sources those engines cite, and analyses the sentiment around your brand — rolled into one Brand Visibility Score.
A practical checklist
- Allow AI crawlers in robots.txt; publish and maintain an llms.txt.
- Add a one-sentence direct answer under every H2.
- Convert dense prose into tables and bullet lists where it aids extraction.
- Ship Organization + FAQPage + Product JSON-LD.
- Identify the URLs AI cites for your money prompts and earn a mention there.
- Track a small set of high-intent prompts over time and fix the worst answers first.