What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?
Why it matters for B2B
Buyers now ask an assistant before they search. The assistant does not show ten links and let the buyer judge. It reads what it can reach, composes a paragraph, and the buyer hears that paragraph. If your site is hard for a machine to read, or vague about who it serves, you are either missing from the answer or described in a hedge.
What it involves
Four things decide most of it, and all four are checkable. An llms.txt file that tells AI systems what the site contains. A robots.txt that lets AI crawlers in rather than blocking them by default. Structured data that states what the company is, what it sells and who it is for. And a clean sitemap, so the pages you want read are the pages that get read.
The fifth is not technical. It is whether the homepage says, in plain words, what the company does and for whom. Assistants repeat your positioning. If it is vague, the answer is vague.
How it differs from SEO
SEO optimizes pages to rank for queries. AEO optimizes a company to be understood. The two share foundations, fast pages, clear headings, real content, but AEO adds machine-readable statements of fact and removes anything that blocks the readers that matter now. Good AEO rarely hurts SEO, and usually helps it.
Where to start
Run a cold read: give an assistant only the visible text of your homepage and ask what the company does and who it serves. The gaps in its answer are the gaps in your page. Then grade your llms.txt, or generate one if it does not exist.
Related
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