AEO
How do you actually do AEO? A working checklist
Most writing on this explains why answer engines matter and stops there. Here is the actual list.
1. Make sure you can be read
Start here, because everything else is wasted otherwise. Check that your robots.txt does not block the crawlers that feed answer engines, and check that your host or CDN is not blocking them independently of your settings.
This trips people up constantly. Bot protection at the host level can refuse AI crawlers without the site owner ever knowing, so the site is invisible to assistants while looking perfectly healthy in Google.
2. Answer the question in the first paragraph
Under every question heading, put the complete answer immediately. Not context, not a preamble about why the question is interesting. The answer.
The test is whether that paragraph still makes sense with the rest of the page deleted. If it does not, it will not survive being quoted.
3. Use the words people actually use
People do not ask about mobile optimisation, they ask why their site looks broken on a phone. Write the question the way it is asked out loud, because assistants are matching against natural language rather than keyword strings.
4. Mark it up
Add structured data. FAQ markup for question and answer pairs, organisation and local business markup for who and where you are, article markup for posts.
Nobody has publicly confirmed that markup directly causes an AI citation. What it reliably does is remove ambiguity about what your page says, and reducing ambiguity is the whole job.
5. Make your facts agree everywhere
Your name, address, service area and description of what you do should be identical on your site, your Google Business Profile, and every directory listing you have.
Assistants weigh agreement across sources. Contradiction is a reason to leave you out.
6. Add an llms.txt if you like, but know what it is
It costs an hour and harms nothing. It is also not a confirmed ranking mechanism, which is covered in what llms.txt actually does.
7. Measure by asking
Write down the ten questions your customers ask. Put each one to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google, and record whether you are named. Repeat monthly.
It is manual and slightly tedious and it is more honest than any dashboard currently on sale.
Common questions
What is the first thing to do for AEO?
Confirm assistants can actually read your site. Check that AI crawlers are not blocked in robots.txt or by your host's bot protection, because a page nothing can fetch cannot be quoted no matter how well it is written.
How should a page be structured for answer engines?
Question as a heading, complete answer immediately underneath in one self-contained passage, then detail below for readers. Add FAQ markup so the question and answer pairs are machine readable as well as human readable.
Does adding an FAQ section help with AEO?
It helps because it forces the structure answer engines need: a clear question, and an answer that stands alone. The markup makes that structure explicit rather than something a parser has to infer.
How do you know if AEO is working?
Ask the assistants directly and repeatedly. Query ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI overviews with the questions your customers ask, and record whether you are named. It is manual, and it is currently the most reliable measurement available.