AEO Guide
The Answer Engine Optimization guide
A practical introduction to getting recommended by AI engines: what they look for, what usually goes wrong, and where to start.
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1. Define your entity in plain language
Engines need a sentence they can quote: who you are, what you do, for whom, and where. Put it in your homepage H1 or first paragraph, repeat it in your metadata description, and back it with Organization schema. Avoid slogans in the H1 — “We build beautiful things” tells a model nothing.
2. Make your specialisation visible as depth, not a tag
One page about your niche reads as a category. A cluster — a service page, a guide, case studies with outcomes and an FAQ, all interlinked — reads as expertise. Engines infer specialisation from depth.
3. Publish the comparison content buyers ask for
“Best X for Y”, “X vs Y”, “how much does X cost” — engines answer these by citing pages that already frame the answer. Write them honestly, include a verdict and a table, and add FAQ schema.
4. Ship structured data that repeats your claims
- Organization with name, url, logo, sameAs and areaServed.
- Service or Product on every offering page.
- FAQPage on question-and-answer content.
- Person for authors, linked to the Organization.
5. Be readable without JavaScript
Most AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript. If your key content renders client-side, it doesn't exist to them. Server-render it or pre-render it.
6. Earn corroboration
A claim on your own domain is weak evidence. The same claim on five other domains — directories, reviews, press, partner pages — is strong evidence. Surface the corroboration you already have and link it from your Organization schema.
7. Measure what engines actually say
Track the real questions your buyers ask, check them on every engine, and record mentions, positions and citations over time. That's the loop RankVyze runs for you.
Primary sources
Everything above is checkable against the specifications and the crawler operators' own documentation. If you only read one, make it the crawler list for the engine you care about most — the user-agent strings change more often than the advice does.
- Schema.orgThe vocabulary behind Organization, Service and FAQPage markup.
- OpenAI — GPTBot and crawler controlsCurrent user-agent strings and how to allow or block them.
- Anthropic — ClaudeBot and site ownersHow Anthropic's crawler identifies itself and honours robots.txt.
- Google — crawler and fetcher overviewIncludes Google-Extended, the control for Gemini training and grounding.
- llmstxt.orgThe /llms.txt convention referenced in step 5.