What is AEO, answer engine optimisation? A plain guide
AEO, answer engine optimisation, is the work of making a page easy for AI answer engines to read, parse and quote. It overlaps with SEO but it is not the same: AEO rewards explicit facts (who the firm works with, what it does, where it is, what it is qualified to do) and machine-readable structure (schema.org JSON-LD, an llms.txt, text in the raw HTML) more than it rewards keywords.
What does AEO change on a page?
- It makes the niche explicit rather than implied.
- It lists services as named items.
- It states exclusions, so a model can match a client.
- It adds FAQ content and FAQPage structured data.
- It keeps the copy in the HTML, not behind JavaScript.
No one can promise a citation; AEO makes a page easy to read, parse and quote, which is the part a firm controls. The twenty-six checks are exactly this list, applied to your own page.