AEO SERIES
The conditions answer engines cite under,
set out in 7 parts
Seven parts on the conditions under which answer engines cite a document, and the work that follows. It starts from the concepts and moves through how to write the documents, the technical requirements and structured data, ending with how to judge a performance figure. Read it in order.
- Concepts Part 1. What is the difference between AEO and SEO? SEO is the work of earning a click from a search result; AEO is the work of being cited inside an answer AI has written. The underlying technology overlaps considerably, but the performance metric changes from rank and traffic to citation rate and mention accuracy.
- Content Part 2. How are articles that AI cites different? AI cites paragraphs, not whole documents. So the question has to become the heading and the answer has to finish in the next one or two sentences. A structure that saves the conclusion for the end never produces a liftable fragment, because lifting the opening answers nothing.
- Diagnosis Part 3. Why ChatGPT does not mention your company When AI does not mention a brand, the cause is almost always one of five: the search-side AI bots cannot read the site; there is no document that answers the question; the site is not in the index that engine sees; the brand is written differently on each channel; or the information is out of date. Checking in that order usually finds it.
- Technical Part 4. Should you allow AI crawlers in robots.txt? If the goal is being cited in AI answers, you should allow them. Blocking removes the path into that engine's answers entirely. Where the content itself is the product, though, selectively blocking only the training crawlers is a reasonable middle course.
- Structured data Part 5. Where should you start with structured data? Start with Organization, then expand to BreadcrumbList and FAQPage. Adding more schema types matters far less than having the values match exactly what is visible on screen.
- Operations Part 6. AI is stating our brand information incorrectly. How do we fix it? Wrong AI answers usually arise because no authoritative source carries the accurate information, or because older information is referenced more readily. There is no way to ask AI to correct itself directly — you build the official page that serves as the basis for the correction, pin the facts with structured data, and track it until it is cited again.
- Judging results Part 7. How far can you trust the performance figures an AEO agency quotes? A figure with no measurement conditions attached cannot be verified. How many questions were asked, in which answer engines, when, and whether the number is measured or illustrative — a citation rate or improvement missing those four is a sentence shaped like a number.
Some articles are deliberately outside the series — llms.txt because it is an adjacent subject, and the regional search measurement report because it is a data publication rather than commentary. The full list is on insights.
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