More purchasing decisions now start with a question asked to a model, not a search engine. If your business isn’t in that answer—you don’t exist in that channel.
SEO and AEO are two layers#
- SEO answers the question: Will Google show your page?
- AEO answers the question: Will the model cite your content in its response?
Both layers rely on the same foundation: readable structure, reliable facts, and structured data (schema.org).
How to build for AEO#
- Answer directly. A section with a one-sentence, citable answer at the top of the topic.
- Structured data. Article, FAQPage, Breadcrumb—so the machine understands context.
- Content map for models. An
llms.txtfile with a site guide.
Measure, don’t guess#
Without measuring AEO, it’s fortune-telling. A custom monitoring system (like Rank Sentinel) lets you track rankings in Google and citability in model responses—with full history for trend analysis. You can structure the measurement itself in four steps:
- Prompt set. Build 10–20 real questions your customer asks (e.g. “best company for AI implementation in Poland,” “how much does an AI agent cost”), including variants without your brand name—those reveal whether the model reaches for you on its own.
- Cadence. Re-run the same prompts weekly or every two weeks on ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Citability shifts slowly, so the trend matters, not a single reading.
- What to log per question. Whether you were cited (yes/no), the order of the citation in the response, the exact URL or snippet, and which competitors are co-cited.
- Share-of-voice metric. Your share is the number of responses that cited you, divided by the number of prompts checked. Share-of-voice against competitors is your citations divided by all brand citations in that set. Track both numbers over time—a single percentage says little, the direction says everything.
Related paths#
The practical AEO foundation is covered in AI model citability, the Rank Sentinel product, and our research hub for data and visibility.
FAQ#
What is AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)?#
It’s optimizing content to be cited by answer engines—ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews. What counts is a concise, self-contained answer at the top of the page and clean structured data.
How does AEO differ from classic SEO?#
SEO fights for position in links; AEO fights to be cited in a model’s response. It requires answer-first, FAQPage, entities, and facts easy to extract—not just keywords.
How to measure visibility in model responses?#
By monitoring citability: ask models about your topics and check if and how they cite you. This complements rank tracking in Google with visibility in the AI layer.