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.txt that 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.

AEO is line item 2 of the Full build on the turnkey page; the site itself is the demo.

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".

Message on Telegram Read the scope of work

Marketing engineer for marketplaces — two funnels that must be readable at the same time, liquidity as the readable unit, why each side needs its own floor (13,914 per arm; 27,828 in total; 70 months for a 400-seller-a-month supply side) and the four decisions taken before the first contact.

Marketing engineer for agencies — an agency cannot pool its clients' traffic, so every client needs its own floor and its own read-out date: 13,914 per arm (27,828 total), 14 months for a client at 2,000 contacts a month, and 4,638 contacts a month as the smallest client readable inside 6 months.