Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): make your site ready for AI search

AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude — increasingly answer your customers before they ever reach a search results page. AEO is how you make sure the AI reads your site, trusts it, and cites you. Here is what actually matters, and a free tool to check any URL.

Check your site free — get an AEO readiness score and the issues to fix:
See a sample full report

The five things that make a site AEO-ready

  1. Add JSON-LD structured data. Put Organization, Service/Product, and FAQPage schema in a script tag in your page head. This is the strongest single signal that lets an AI describe and cite you accurately.
  2. Publish an llms.txt. Add /llms.txt at your root: a short Markdown file naming your business, your offerings, and your key URLs. Give models a clean canonical summary.
  3. Write answer-shaped content. Turn headings into the real questions customers ask, and put a tight, factual answer directly beneath each. Models quote concise, self-contained answers.
  4. Stay crawlable and fast. Serve real HTML (not JS-only), keep robots.txt open to answer bots, ship a sitemap.xml, and keep pages fast. If a crawler cannot read it, no AI can cite it.
  5. Name your entities clearly. State your business name, location, and category in plain text and in schema. Consistent entity naming helps models resolve who you are with confidence.

Frequently asked questions

What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?

AEO is optimizing a website so AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude — can read it, trust it, and cite it in their answers. Where SEO chases blue links, AEO chases being the sentence the AI quotes. The mechanics are machine-readable structure: JSON-LD schema, an llms.txt file, question-shaped headings, and clean crawlable HTML.

What is an llms.txt file and do I need one?

llms.txt is a plain-text file at your site root (/llms.txt) that tells AI crawlers, in Markdown, who you are, what you offer, and which pages matter. It is to LLMs what robots.txt is to search bots. It is an emerging convention, cheap to add, and it gives models a clean canonical summary instead of making them guess from your nav and footer.

Which JSON-LD schema types matter most for AI search?

Organization (who you are), Service or Product (what you sell), FAQPage (direct question/answer pairs models love to quote), and WebPage with speakable (voice answers). Put them in a <script type="application/ld+json"> block in the page head. Valid, specific schema is the single highest-leverage AEO change for most small business sites.

How do I know if my site is AEO-ready?

Check four things: (1) valid JSON-LD structured data in the head, (2) an llms.txt at the root, (3) headings phrased as the questions your customers actually ask, with a concise answer directly under each, and (4) fast, server-rendered HTML a crawler can read without running JavaScript. Run the free audit below to score any URL on exactly these.

Is AEO different from traditional SEO?

They overlap but the target differs. SEO optimizes for ranking in a list of links; AEO optimizes for being extracted and cited inside a generated answer. Good SEO hygiene (crawlability, speed, clear content) still helps, but AEO adds machine-readable structure and answer-shaped copy on top.

Do it in one call

The AEO Schema Forge is a pay-per-call API (x402 / USDC on Base — no login, no API key). It generates the JSON-LD, llms.txt, and answer copy above for your business, and audits a live URL with exact fixes.

Free URL score Full audit — 0.1 USDC Schema + JSON-LD — 0.05 USDC llms.txt tier — 0.01 USDC

New: the llms.txt format, an example, and a free generator.

Machine-readable discovery: /.well-known/x402