Getting Started

What is AEO?

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring your web content so that AI-powered answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, and others — can confidently extract, cite, and surface your content as authoritative answers.

Why AEO matters now

Traditional SEO was built around 10 blue links. You optimized for a crawler that matched keywords to documents. But AI answer engines work fundamentally differently: they read your page, extract the meaning, and synthesise a response. If your content is hard to parse, ambiguously structured, or lacks the right signals, the AI skips you entirely — even if you rank #1 in traditional search.

Studies suggest that AI answers are already reducing click-through rates on informational queries by 30–60%. The pages that do get cited have a clear pattern: they answer the question directly at the top, use structured HTML, include schema markup, and demonstrate genuine expertise. That's exactly what AEO optimizes for.

How the AEO Tool works

1. Input a URL or keyword
Paste a live URL to score an existing page, or enter a target keyword to get recommendations for content you're planning to build. The tool auto-detects context when you provide a URL.
2. AI-powered analysis
The tool fetches and parses your page, running it through 7 scoring dimensions that simulate how an AI answer engine evaluates content quality, structure, and trustworthiness.
3. Prioritized recommendations
You receive a scored report with specific, actionable recommendations ordered by impact. Each recommendation explains what to change, why it matters, and how to implement it.
4. Build or publish
Use the Page Builder to generate a fully optimized page from scratch, or push changes directly to connected WordPress and Webflow sites.

The 7 scoring dimensions

Every analysis produces scores across 7 dimensions. Each score is 0–100, and the overall score is a weighted aggregate. Higher is better — a score of 80+ means the page is well-optimized; below 50 indicates significant gaps that likely cause AI engines to underweight or skip the content.

AEO Readiness
Information Retrieval Cost
HTML5 Semantics
Accessibility
E-E-A-T Signals
Content Patterns
CRO
Full dimension guide
See Understanding Scores for a detailed explanation of what each dimension measures, how it's calculated, and how to improve it.

What AEO doesn't replace

AEO optimization works alongside — not instead of — traditional SEO. You still need:

  • Good keyword targeting and topical authority
  • Technical SEO (crawlability, Core Web Vitals, indexing)
  • Strong backlink profile for domain authority
  • Content that genuinely answers the user's intent