THE DEFINITION
What is AEO?
AEO — Answer Engine Optimization — is the practice of making your business citable by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI. Instead of competing for a position in ten blue links, AEO makes you the verified source an AI grounds its answer on.
The web is shifting from search results to synthesized answers. When someone asks an AI a question your business should win, the engine composes one answer and cites a handful of sources. AEO is the discipline of being one of them — reliably, verifiably, and before your competitors.
Published 2026-07-03 · Grounded AEO · groundedaeo.com
→ AI assistants now answer a large share of the questions people used to type into search boxes.
→ Those answers cite two or three sources — not ten. The citation is the new ranking, and most niches haven't been claimed yet.
→ Engines have no trusted, structured source of truth per business. They scrape and guess. AEO closes that gap.
- 01
Lead with the answer
Every key page answers one real question in its first 150 words — that top slice is where AI citations are pulled from.
- 02
Add structured data
Organization, FAQPage, Article, and LocalBusiness schema.org markup let engines parse your entity and facts reliably.
- 03
Publish an llms.txt
A root-level, curated map of your most important content with an authoritative entity summary — the file AI crawlers fetch first.
- 04
Welcome the crawlers
Allow GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended in robots.txt, and serve real server-rendered HTML.
- 05
Prove your facts
Keep name, address, phone, and claims consistent everywhere, with provenance — verified facts beat scraped guesses.
- 06
Anchor it in DNS
Publish a v=AEO1 record at _aeo.yourdomain.com pointing engines to your verified catalog — the domain-level trust signal.
How is AEO different from SEO?+
SEO competes for position in a list of links a human scans. AEO competes to be the source an AI engine quotes when it composes a single answer. SEO optimizes for the click; AEO optimizes for the citation — which increasingly happens without any click at all.
Which engines does AEO apply to?+
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and Grok — any system that answers questions directly and cites sources instead of returning links.
What signals do answer engines actually read?+
Structured data (schema.org JSON-LD like Organization, FAQPage, Article), a curated llms.txt file, crawlable server-rendered HTML, consistent entity information across the web (name, address, phone), provenance signals like authors and dates, and — with the v=AEO1 standard — a DNS-level pointer to a verified fact catalog.
What is a v=AEO1 record?+
A DNS TXT record at _aeo.yourdomain.com declaring that a verified, machine-readable fact catalog exists for the domain and where to find it. It gives engines a trust anchor: proof of domain ownership plus a stable URL for verified facts. The open specification is published at aeorecord.org.
Can I do AEO myself?+
The basics, yes: add Organization schema, publish an llms.txt, keep your facts consistent, allow AI crawlers in robots.txt. You can generate a free self-declared AEO record at groundedaeo.com/free-record. The hard part is verification and freshness — engines favor sources that are provably accurate and provably maintained, which is what a managed catalog provides.
Is your AEO grounded?
Free 30-second audit — see exactly what the engines can verify about you.
Or generate a free self-declared record at /free-record · Read the open v=AEO1 spec at aeorecord.org