06AEO
Be the answer,not just aresult.
People increasingly ask an assistant instead of scrolling a results page. That changes what winning looks like: not a position in a list, but being the source the answer is built from — and quoted accurately.
01The problem
A result nobody scrolls to
When someone asks an assistant rather than searching, there is no page of ten blue links to place tenth in. There is an answer, assembled from sources the model considers clear and trustworthy, and a handful of citations. If your business is not legible enough to be one of them, you are absent rather than ranked low.
Legibility here is technical. It means your services, people, locations, prices and claims exist as structured facts rather than only as sentences in a paragraph, and that the questions people ask are answered directly somewhere a machine can find them. Most sites are not built this way, which is why this is still worth doing early.
02What it involves
What the work actually is
- Entity modelling
- Your business described as structured facts — services, people, credentials, locations, hours — so there is an authoritative source to draw from.
- Structured data
- Schema that validates and actually describes the page, including the types that answer engines lean on most.
- Answer-shaped content
- Direct answers to real questions, placed where they can be extracted rather than buried in narrative.
- llms.txt
- A plain-language summary of the business for AI crawlers, generated from the same source as the site so it cannot drift out of date.
- Crawler access
- A deliberate decision about which AI crawlers to allow, on the view that being quoted accurately beats not being quoted.
- Citation monitoring
- Checking what assistants actually say about you, which is frequently not what you assume.
03How it runs
How the work runs
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01
Ask the assistants
Establish what AI search currently says about you and your competitors. This is the baseline, and it is often the moment the problem becomes obvious.
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02
Model the entities
Turn the business into structured facts — who, what, where, what it costs, what is claimed and what evidences it.
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03
Restructure content
Answer the real questions directly and legibly, rather than gesturing at them across three paragraphs of positioning.
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04
Ship the schema layer
Structured data, llms.txt and crawler policy implemented and validated.
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05
Re-ask and compare
Back to step one. The only honest measure of this work is whether the answers changed.
04What you get
What you end up with
- A baseline of what AI search currently says about you
- A validated structured-data and entity layer
- Content restructured to answer real questions directly
- A generated llms.txt kept in sync with the site
- A documented AI crawler policy
06Honestly
When this is the wrong service
AEO sits on top of technical SEO rather than replacing it. If your pages cannot be crawled or your site has no content to structure, this is the wrong order — fix the foundation first. And it is genuinely early: treat it as a position worth taking, not a channel with predictable return.
Probably better: SEOWeb Development
07Questions
AEO — common questions
01 Is AEO just SEO with a new name?
They overlap and they are not the same. SEO competes for a position on a results page. AEO works to be the source an assistant builds its answer from, which rewards structured facts and direct answers more than it rewards conventional ranking factors.
02 Does this actually bring traffic?
Sometimes less traffic and better traffic — an assistant may answer the question without a click. The honest framing is that this is about being present and described accurately in a channel that is growing, and we would rather say that than quote a return we cannot evidence.
03 Should I block AI crawlers instead?
That is a real choice and it depends on your business. Our position, and what this site does, is to allow them: if an assistant is going to describe you either way, being the accurate source is better than being absent from it.
04 How do you measure it?
By asking the assistants before and after, on the questions that matter commercially, and comparing what they say. It is less tidy than a rankings report and considerably more honest.
08Also relevant