AEO · AI search · machine-readable
Answer engine optimization: getting cited, not just ranked
When a buyer asks an assistant who does a job well, the answer is assembled from pages that are structured, specific and machine-readable. That is a build task, not a copywriting mood.
The four things that decide whether you get quoted
- A direct answer in the first two sentences. Assistants extract passages; bury the answer and the passage someone else wrote gets quoted instead.
- Structure a machine can parse. Schema for the service, the offer and the questions, plus clean headings.
- Permission and signposting. A robots policy that does not lock AI crawlers out, and an
llms.txtthat states what the site is. - Facts with links. Named artifacts, live URLs, prices. Unsourced claims are the first thing a model drops.
Inspect the version of this running here
- /llms.txt — site summary written for models, not for a checklist.
- /robots.txt — explicit AI-crawler policy.
- /marketing-engineer.html — Service + Offer + FAQPage structured data.
- /cases.html — the artifact index, every entry a working link.
- /sitemap.xml — the full page inventory.
Questions people actually ask
What is answer engine optimization?
Making a site legible to the systems that answer questions on someone's behalf: assistants, AI search, and agent crawlers. They read text, structure and machine-readable hints — not your brand video.
Is it different from SEO?
The same fundamentals, different reader. Classic SEO optimises for a ranking list; AEO optimises for a passage being quoted with a source. You still need the page to be indexable for both.
What does it cost and how long does it take?
It is part of the fixed packages: $900 Sprint, $1,900/month Engine, $2,900 full build. Structural work is days; being consistently cited is a quarterly outcome, not a weekly one.
Next step
Tell me what you sell and what you have already tried. I answer with a fixed scope and a price, not with a call to "explore synergies".