What is AEO? A plain-English guide to AI-engine optimisation
AEO (AI-engine optimisation) helps assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity understand and cite your business. Here is how it works and what to do.
How AEO differs from SEO
Traditional SEO helps a search engine rank your pages in a list of links. AEO helps an AI assistant decide what to say, and whom to name, when someone asks a question directly. The two overlap heavily: fast pages, clear structure and trustworthy content help both. But AEO puts extra weight on clarity, consistency and machine-readable facts.
What assistants look for
- Clear entity facts: who you are, where you operate, what you offer, in plain sentences.
- Structured data: schema.org markup such as Organization, LocalBusiness, Product, Service and FAQPage.
- Answer-first content: a direct answer in the first lines of a page, followed by detail.
- Consistency: the same name, address, hours and descriptions across your site, Google Business Profile and directories.
- Crawl access: a robots.txt that allows reputable AI crawlers and an llms.txt that summarises your site.
A practical AEO checklist
- Write a two-sentence answer to your most common customer questions and place it at the top of the relevant page.
- Add JSON-LD for your organisation, services and FAQs.
- Publish an llms.txt describing your business and key pages.
- Keep your Google Business Profile accurate and active.
- Earn mentions on reputable sites that describe what you do in the same words.
- Measure referrals from AI assistants in GA4 and Search Console alongside organic search.
What AEO cannot do
No one can guarantee that an assistant will name your business. Models change, and results vary by question and location. What you can do is remove every avoidable reason for being overlooked. That is how Zonafi Labs approaches AEO: engineering the foundations, then measuring.