Answer Engine Optimization, without the folklore.
AEO is young enough that most advice is guesswork repeated confidently. This is what we can defend, and what we can't.
Start with access, not content
The most common reason a site is never cited is not that its writing is weak — it's that the crawler never saw it. Check robots rules, then your WAF, then whether your content exists without JavaScript. Everything downstream is wasted effort until this passes.
Write claims, not copy
An engine quoting you needs a sentence that stands on its own. "Flat-rate shipping to Canada is $6, free over $40" can be lifted. "We offer great shipping options" cannot. Specific, self-contained, verifiable.
Answer the question in the heading
Headings that pose the question a visitor actually asks, followed immediately by the answer, are the easiest structure for a machine to extract and the easiest for a person to skim. The two goals aren't in tension.
Measure citation, not proxies
Rankings, impressions and traffic are the old instruments. If you want to know whether engines cite you, the only honest method is to ask them the questions your customers ask and record what they say. That's what ARIA's Citation stage does.
What to ignore
- llms.txt — Google says it uses no such file; no study has found an effect
- Special AI schema — no engine documents one
- Content chunking for machines — helps nothing, hurts readability
- Keyword density — it didn't work for search either