How do I get my website found in AI Search? An intro to AEO

Search behaviour has shifted.

People aren’t just Googling things anymore. They’re asking ChatGPT. They’re using Claude. They’re typing full sentences into Perplexity. They’re trusting whatever appears in Google’s AI Overviews instead of scrolling to the blue links underneath.

For most of us who own or manage a website, this raises a slightly stressful question: is my site even part of this conversation?

That’s what AEO is about. And if you’re reading this thinking “I’ve barely got my head around SEO,” I have good news and bad news. The bad news is yes, AEO is a new thing to learn. The good news is the foundations are nowhere near as messy as 25+ years of SEO have been, and most of the work is logical, learnable, and pays off quickly.

What is AEO?

AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization. The “answer engines” are AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google’s AI Overviews. AEO is the practice of making sure those tools can find your website, understand what you do, and quote you when they’re answering someone’s question.

Notice the goal. It’s not a ranking. It’s a citation.

Traditional SEO has always been about getting your site onto page one of Google so people click through. AEO is different. When someone asks ChatGPT “what’s the best running shoe for flat feet?”, the AI doesn’t give them a list of websites to click. It gives them an answer. And sometimes, if you’re lucky and your site is set up well, it cites you as the source.

That citation is the new top of page one. It’s the new “above the fold.” It’s what you’re optimizing for.

We've been trying to understand SEO for 25+ years. Here we go again.

If you’ve been around the web long enough, you’ll remember that SEO has always been a moving target. Google’s first algorithm update was in 2003. There have been thousands since. Every few years, the rules shifted under everyone’s feet: keyword stuffing died, link farms died, content farms died, mobile-first became a thing, then Core Web Vitals, then Helpful Content updates, and on and on.

Through all of that, businesses have invested countless hours and dollars trying to understand what Google wants. SEO agencies have built entire careers on it. There are entire books, conferences, and software platforms devoted to a single search engine’s preferences.

AEO is at the very beginning of that journey. The “rules” are still being figured out. The AI engines themselves are still figuring out how they want to source and cite information. New standards (like llms.txt) are being proposed and adopted as we speak. It’s noisy and a little chaotic.

But here’s the thing, being early matters. If you wait until everyone’s doing it, you’re already behind.

If you own a website or manage one for a business, this is the moment to start caring.

On-page vs off-page (yes, just like SEO)

If you’ve ever talked to an SEO person, you’ve heard the terms “on-page” and “off-page.” The same idea applies in AEO.

On-page is everything that lives on your own website. The stuff you have direct control over. In AEO terms, that means:

• Whether AI crawlers (the bots that fetch your pages for ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) are actually allowed to read your site
• Whether your content is structured so an AI can extract clean, citable facts from it
• Whether you've added the right structured data ("schema markup") so AI engines have confident facts about who you are, what you sell, and how much it costs
• Whether you have things like llms.txt (a new file that acts as a guided tour of your site for AI engines)
• Whether the page leads with a clear answer to the question it's about, rather than burying it under marketing prose

Off-page is everything that happens elsewhere on the web that affects how AI engines perceive you. Things like:

• Whether other websites link to you (yes, backlinks still matter)
• Whether your business or your team is mentioned on authoritative sites (industry publications, review platforms, partner blogs)
• Whether you exist on Wikipedia
• Whether your founders or experts are quoted elsewhere as authorities
• Whether your social profiles, app store listings, and third-party directory listings all agree about who you are

AI engines look at both. On-page work makes you readable and citable. Off-page work makes you credible enough to cite.

Most of the work that delivers results in the first few months is on-page. It’s the stuff you control directly, it’s the stuff that’s broken on most websites today, and fixing it is usually a matter of days or weeks rather than months.

What kind of questions are your customers actually asking AI?

This is the part that, once it clicks, changes how you think about your website forever.

When people use Google, they tend to type short keyword-style searches. “Web developer Sydney.” “Best CRM.” “Tax accountant Brisbane.” They’re scanning, comparing, and clicking.

When people use AI, they ask actual questions. Long ones. With context. The way they’d ask a knowledgeable friend at a dinner party. Real patterns we see across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and AI Overviews:

• "What's the best HR software for a 50 person remote company?"
• "How much does a kitchen renovation cost in Sydney right now?"
• "What should I look for when choosing a Webflow developer?"
• "How does HubSpot compare with Salesforce for small businesses?"
• "Who is the best comapny to develop my startup in Australia?"
• "Do I need a CRM if I already have HubSpot?"

These aren’t keywords. They’re full questions, with context, often with comparisons baked in.

The sites that get cited for questions like these have three things in common.

First, clear answer-first content. The page directly addresses the question in the first paragraph or two: no scrolling required. If a user asked Claude “what does this company actually do?”, Claude could find the answer in the first 50 words of your homepage.

Second, structured data that confidently states facts the AI can quote. Schema markup tells the AI “this is a product, called X, priced at $Y, available in these regions.” Without it, the AI is guessing from prose. With it, the AI has facts.

Third, entity signals that establish credibility. Who you are. What you do. Who you’ve worked with. Where you’re located. Whether your social profiles, your “About” page, and your structured data all agree.

It’s worth pausing on this last one because it’s the thing most small businesses get wrong. Your business name might appear as “Acme” in your logo, “Acme Pty Ltd” in your footer, “Acme Inc.” in your Google Business listing, and “Acme Studios” on your LinkedIn. To you, that’s obvious: same company. To an AI engine, that’s potentially three or four separate entities. The fix is unglamorous but powerful: make sure every signal agrees.

The good news: most of this is fixable

When people first hear about AEO, the natural reaction is “ugh, another thing.” Fair. But here’s the genuine good news.

Most AEO improvements are concrete, technical fixes that don’t require rewriting your entire website or hiring a content team. They’re things like:

• Adding an llms.txt file (typically 30 minutes of work)
• Updating schema markup so the price on your pricing page matches what's actually in the schema
• Making sure AI crawlers aren't accidentally blocked by your robots.txt file
• Adding FAQ sections to your most-trafficked pages (and marking them up with FAQ schema so AI engines can find the questions and answers)
• Cleaning up brand-name inconsistencies across your site, schema, and social profiles
• Ensuring your most important pages — pricing, services, about — lead with a clear, extractable answer

A surprising number of these are “yes” or “no” questions with clear technical fixes. Most can be done by a developer in an hour or two each. The hardest part isn’t the doing: it’s knowing what needs doing in the first place.

How we can help

Because I’m one of the people who got nerdy about this, I built a tool to do this kind of analysis automatically. It’s called the AEO Audit and it does exactly what the name suggests: give us your website URL and we produce a written report covering everything above. AI crawler access, schema quality and drift, entity signals, llms.txt presence, content extractability, the works.

The report comes back as a written document you can act on yourself, hand to a developer, or take to your existing agency. It’s the same audit we’ve started to run on our own clients’ sites, and we’ll re-run it weekly or monthly so we can spot when things drift: a price change in the CMS that didn’t update the schema, a new blog post that didn’t get the right structured data, a CMS template change that accidentally stripped some markup. The kind of stuff that breaks quietly between audits and gradually erodes your AI visibility.

If you want to see what’s working on your site, what’s not, and where the highest-leverage fixes are, reach out and we’ll run one for you.

Where to start if you only do one thing

If reading this has prompted a vague “I should probably do something” feeling but you don’t know where to begin, here’s the single highest-leverage thing you can do today: check whether AI crawlers are allowed to read your site.

Go to yourwebsite.com/robots.txt. Look at the file. If you see anything like User-agent: GPTBot followed by Disallow: /, or User-agent: * followed by Disallow: /, you may be accidentally telling AI engines not to crawl your site at all. Plenty of well-meaning website owners and security plugins have done this without realising, and the consequence is that none of the rest of this matters until it’s fixed.

That single check costs you nothing, takes 60 seconds, and reveals whether your site is in the game or sitting on the bench.

After that, the rest is a journey worth starting. AEO isn’t a one-time fix and it isn’t a magic bullet. It’s a discipline, much like SEO has been for the last quarter-century. But unlike SEO, it’s at the very beginning of its arc. The websites that take it seriously now are the ones that will be cited by AI engines for years to come.

That could be yours.