AEO Explained: How to Get Recommended by ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity

What is AEO?

AEO stands for answer engine optimization. It is the practice of preparing your website so that AI assistants — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and the AI answers inside search engines — can find your business, understand what it does, and recommend or cite it when someone asks a question.

Search engines show a list of links and let the person choose. An assistant gives one answer and names a handful of sources at most. Being on page one is no longer the whole game; you want to be one of the few businesses the answer mentions.

How do AI assistants decide who to recommend?

Assistants work from two places: what they learned when they were trained, and what they can look up live. In both cases they rely on text they can read and facts they can verify. They favour businesses that are described consistently across the web, whose pages state things plainly, and whose content directly answers the question asked.

What are the first three things to fix?

1. Let the crawlers in. Check your robots.txt and firewall for rules blocking the AI search bots — OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User (ChatGPT), Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User (Claude), PerplexityBot — plus Googlebot and Bingbot, which feed Google's AI Overviews, Copilot and ChatGPT search. Many sites block them by accident through a security plugin, a CDN's 'block AI bots' switch or an old template. Training bots such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended are different: blocking them only opts you out of model training, not out of AI answers.
2. Say who you are, in a way machines can read. Add Organization or LocalBusiness schema with your name, address, services and links to your social profiles. Use exactly the same business name everywhere.
3. Write answers, not slogans. Turn the questions customers ask you into headings, and follow each with a direct one-to-three sentence answer before you add detail.

What does answer-shaped content look like?

Compare two versions of the same page. The first opens with “Welcome to our family of dedicated professionals delivering excellence since 2009.” The second opens with “We repair and install gas boilers for homes in Leeds, with same-day call-outs and fixed prices from the first visit.” An assistant can lift the second sentence straight into an answer. The first tells it nothing.

• Put the answer in the first sentence under each heading.
• Use specifics: prices or price ranges, areas served, timelines, what's included.
• Add a short FAQ section to key pages and mark it up with FAQPage schema.
• Keep important text in the page's HTML, not locked inside images, PDFs or scripts.
• Show dates on articles and keep them current — assistants prefer information they can tell is fresh.

Do you need an llms.txt file?

An llms.txt file is a plain-text summary of your site written for AI systems: what the business is, what it offers, and where the important pages are. It is an emerging convention rather than an official standard, and not every assistant reads it yet. It is quick to create and costs nothing, so it is worth adding once the three fixes above are done — but it will not make up for blocked crawlers or vague content.

Ask an assistant about your own business by name, then ask it to recommend a provider for what you sell in your area. The gaps and mistakes in its answers are your AEO to-do list.

How is AEO different from SEO?

SEO earns you a position in a list of results. AEO earns you a mention inside an answer. They share the same foundations — crawlable pages, clear structure, trustworthy information — which is why the most reliable route to AI visibility is to get the SEO basics right and then make your content more direct and more explicit about who you are.