More and more people search by asking a full question — "how long does it take to build a website?", "who builds landing pages near me?" — and get a ready-made answer back, written by an AI assistant or shown at the top of the search results. AEO, short for Answer Engine Optimization, is the name for preparing your content so it can be understood and cited in those answers.
This is an introductory post. If you already know the basics and want the technical side — llms.txt, signals in robots.txt, MCP servers — I wrote about that in AEO and GEO for AI agents and in a checklist for an agent-ready site.
What AEO is, without the jargon
Traditional SEO works to get your page ranked well in a list of links. AEO works so that, when someone asks a question, the passage that answers it comes from your site — ideally with your name and a link attached.
It is not a separate discipline, and it does not replace SEO. In practice, it is SEO done with extra attention to one thing: answering questions in a way that is clear, complete and easy to extract.
How an answer engine picks what to cite
Nobody outside these companies knows the exact criteria, and I would be wary of anyone who claims to. But the general path is easy enough to follow.
First, the system has to find the page and be able to read it. If the page is not indexed, only shows its content after a lot of JavaScript, or hides its text inside images, it is out before anything else is considered.
Then it looks for a passage that answers the question. A page that gives the answer right below the heading has an advantage over one that takes three paragraphs to get to the point.
Finally, trust comes in: is it clear who is speaking? Does the information match what other sources say? Does the text read like it was written by someone who knows the subject?
Google itself says, in its documentation on AI features in Search, that there is no special optimization or required markup to appear in AI Overviews: the same best practices as regular search apply. I find that good news. The work that helps the machine is the same work that helps the reader.
Start with the questions you already get
The best AEO material is usually sitting in your WhatsApp chats and your inbox. The questions clients ask before hiring you are exactly the ones they also ask a search engine or an assistant.
Write down the most frequent ones. They usually cover topics like:
- how much it costs and what the price depends on;
- how long it takes;
- how the process works;
- the difference between two options;
- whether you serve the person's area or type of business.
If you use Google Search Console, the Performance report shows the queries that brought people to your site — another source of real questions, in the words your audience actually uses.
Direct answer first, context after
For each question, write the answer in the first or second sentence. Context, exceptions and details come after.
An example from my own site. For the question "how long does a landing page take?", a weak answer starts by talking about quality and dedication. A useful answer says: usually 5 to 10 business days; the exact timeline goes in the written proposal, because it depends on the scope and on how much of the content is already ready.
A short, complete answer with the right caveat serves both the reader in a hurry and the machine.
An FAQ that actually answers
A frequently asked questions section is the most natural format for AEO, as long as the questions are real and each answer makes sense on its own, without depending on the previous paragraph.
One honest detail: today Google only shows the visual FAQ rich result for well-known government and health websites. So do not build an FAQ expecting that visual. Build it because it organizes answers people are looking for — answers assistants can cite.
Entities: make who, what and where obvious
Search engines and language models organize the world into entities: people, companies, places, services. The less ambiguity about which entity you are, the better.
In practice, that means spelling out who you are, what you do and where you work, always under the same name. "Innovative solutions for your business" says nothing. "Yan Mantovani, a designer and developer based in Monte Alto, Brazil, builds websites, systems and AI agents" does. I went deeper into this in how to show up on Google when people search your name.
Structured data: the same information, as a fact sheet
Structured data is a block of code, usually JSON-LD, that describes the page using the schema.org vocabulary: this is a person, this is a service, this is a list of questions and answers.
It is not a shortcut to visibility; it reduces doubt. And it has to repeat what is visible on the page. Google explicitly asks you not to mark up information the user cannot see.
On this site, for example, the home page declares a Person as the main entity and an FAQPage with the same questions that appear in the text. To get started, the most useful types are usually Person or Organization, Service, FAQPage and BlogPosting.
What to avoid
- repeating keywords until the text reads oddly;
- creating dozens of near-identical pages that only swap the city name;
- inventing questions nobody asks just to have an FAQ;
- marking up in schema something that is not written on the page.
In the end, AEO is clarity: answering your clients' questions well and organizing those answers in a way machines can read too.
If you would like someone to go over the questions your site answers today, you can write to me through the contact page.