Answer engine optimisation (AEO)
Answer engine optimisation is the practice of structuring a site so that AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews name and cite it when answering a question, rather than optimising for a position in a list of links.
AEO and SEO overlap because both reward authority and clear writing, but they diverge often enough to matter. A page can rank first on Google and never be cited by an answer engine, and a source a model leans on heavily may not rank at all for the same query.
Three things carry most of the weight. The crawlers have to be allowed in, because GPTBot and its peers cannot cite what they cannot fetch. The content has to be extractable from the served HTML, because none of the major retrieval crawlers execute JavaScript. And the passages have to be self-contained, stating a fact and its context in one place, because that is the unit a model quotes.
Related
Generative engine optimisation (GEO)
Generative engine optimisation is the practice of influencing how a brand appears inside AI-generated output, covering both whether it is named and how it is described.
llms.txt
llms.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a site that lists the pages worth quoting and says what each one answers, acting as a curated map for language models rather than a complete index.
Extractability
Extractability is whether a page's meaningful content is present in the HTML the server returns, before any JavaScript runs.
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