AEO: answer engine optimization

Answer engines such as ChatGPT search, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews pull a direct answer from somewhere. AEO is making sure that somewhere can be your page.

What we check

AI crawlers can get in

robots.txt and any CDN bot rules allow the search crawlers for the engines you care about. Blocking training crawlers is your call; blocking search crawlers takes you out of their answers. See The AI crawlers you're blocking by accident.

The answer is in the HTML

Most AI crawlers don't run JavaScript, so the answer has to be in the page the server sends. See To an AI crawler, your homepage has zero links.

Questions get direct answers

Headings phrased the way people ask, followed by a one- or two-sentence answer before the detail. That first answer is the part an engine can lift.

Freshness you can see

A visible published or updated date, and content that's actually current. Changing the date without changing the page doesn't count.

llms.txt

A short file at the root of the site that points machines at your best pages. It's cheap, and we publish one ourselves. Don't expect it to do the work of the four checks above.

FAQ markup, honestly

FAQPage markup is fine to keep, but since 2023 Google shows FAQ rich results only for well-known government and health sites. Write Q&A for readers, not for a search feature. See FAQ schema won't get you FAQ rich results anymore.

Run it yourself

Start with the free AI Bot Access Checker (my own product) to see which AI crawlers your robots.txt lets in.