General

AEO is the practice of structuring your website so AI answer engines - ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude - can find, understand, and cite it. SEO gets you ranked in search results. AEO gets you into AI-generated answers. Different game, different rules.

SEO optimizes for page rankings. AEO optimizes for AI citations - being the source AI systems reference when answering questions. SEO runs on keywords and backlinks. AEO runs on structured data, clean HTML, entity authority, and Q&A content format. They're complementary, but AEO addresses the growing share of searches that never reach traditional results.

All the major ones: ChatGPT (OpenAI), Perplexity AI, Google AI Overviews, Claude (Anthropic), and Microsoft Copilot. Each engine has its own crawlers and citation patterns, but the 22 AEO criteria - organized across 4 dimensions (Content, Structure, Discovery, Trust Signals) - improve visibility across all of them.

Over 60% of Google searches now end without a click. 40% of Gen Z use AI assistants instead of Google. When someone asks ChatGPT about your industry, you're either in the answer or you don't exist. AEO puts you in the conversation where purchase decisions are increasingly made.

An AI citation happens when an answer engine references your website as a source in its response. Perplexity answers a question about your industry and links to your site - that's a citation. Citations drive traffic and establish authority in AI-mediated discovery.

Not at all. Small businesses, local providers, niche e-commerce stores, solo consultants - they all benefit from AI visibility. We've seen smaller sites with well-structured content outperform larger competitors who haven't optimized for AI engines. Size matters less than structure.

Any industry where customers ask questions before buying. Healthcare, legal, financial services, SaaS, e-commerce, professional services, and education see strong results because people use AI assistants to research these topics before making decisions.

AI engines use web crawlers - GPTBot for ChatGPT, ClaudeBot for Claude - to index website content. When a user asks a question, the AI retrieves relevant indexed content, synthesizes an answer, and cites the original source. The better your content is structured for machine reading, the more likely it gets retrieved and cited.

AI-driven traffic is growing fast. Google AI Overviews appear on over 30% of search results. ChatGPT has over 200 million weekly active users. Perplexity processes hundreds of millions of queries monthly. The exact traffic attribution varies by industry, but the trend is undeniable - AI is becoming a primary discovery channel.

Yes. Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant increasingly pull AI-generated answers from web content. The same structured data, Q&A formatting, and entity authority that drive AEO also make your content the go-to source for voice search answers.

Readiness is your technical foundation - whether your site has the right schema, llms.txt, clean HTML, and entity signals in place. Visibility is real-world performance - whether AI engines actually cite you when users ask relevant questions. You need readiness first, then visibility follows. Our audit measures readiness; our visibility analysis measures actual citation rates.

Yes. The 22 AEO criteria across all 4 dimensions (Content, Structure, Discovery, Trust Signals) are language-agnostic. AI engines index content in all major languages. For multilingual sites, hreflang tags help AI crawlers serve the right language version. The same structural principles apply regardless of language.