How to Do AEO Optimization: A Step-by-Step Process From Audit to Measurement

To do AEO optimization, run seven steps in a fixed order: measure what AI engines say about you now, make sure their search crawlers can reach you, settle your brand facts, rewrite your priority pages so the answer comes first, mark those pages up with structured data, get the same facts repeated on independent sites, and then measure again. If the term is new to you, start with our explainer on what AEO is and come back.

The order is the point. A brilliant page that a crawler cannot fetch earns nothing. Schema that contradicts your About page adds confusion rather than clarity. And without a baseline you have no way to tell a real gain from the normal day-to-day wobble in AI answers. Each step below says what it produces, so you can treat it as a project plan rather than a list of ideas.

Start with evidence, not edits. Write down the questions a buyer asks before choosing a product like yours: the category question ("best payroll software for restaurants"), the comparison question ("X vs Y"), the problem question ("how do I stop no-shows") and the brand question ("is X legit"). Twenty or so is plenty for a first pass.

Put each question to the engines your buyers use and record three things per answer: whether your brand is named, which competitors are named, and which URLs are cited as sources. The sources column is the most useful one. It tells you which pages and which third-party sites the engines already trust for your topic, and that list becomes your target list in step 6.

Date the sheet. AI answers shift as engines re-crawl and update, so a single snapshot means little on its own. Its job is to be the "before" you compare against in step 7. If you would rather not run the questions by hand, the free scan at AEO Grader gives you a starting score and a one-minute snapshot, and the method behind it is documented on our methodology page.

Each answer engine runs a search crawler, and a page that crawler cannot fetch cannot be quoted. Check your robots.txt for the user agents that matter. OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Perplexity's crawler page describes PerplexityBot as designed to surface and link websites in Perplexity search results. Anthropic warns that disabling Claude-SearchBot may reduce your visibility in Claude's search results. Training crawlers such as GPTBot are a separate decision; blocking them does not remove you from search answers.

Robots.txt is only half of the check. Google's guide to AI features and your website lists making sure crawling is allowed in robots.txt and by any CDN or hosting infrastructure among the fundamentals. Bot-protection rules at the edge often block AI crawlers silently while robots.txt says "allow". Look at your server or CDN logs for each user agent and confirm you see successful responses, not challenges or errors.

Finally, check that your important content is present as text in the HTML. Pricing hidden in an image, specifications behind a tab that loads only after a click, or answers locked inside a PDF are all harder for a crawler to read than a plain paragraph.

AI engines describe your brand by combining what many pages say about it. When those pages disagree, the description gets vague or wrong. The fix is boring and effective: write a one-page fact sheet and make it the source for everything else.

The fact sheet should state, in plain sentences, your exact brand name and any former names, the category you belong to in the words buyers use, who the product is for, what it costs or how pricing works, where you operate, and the two or three things that genuinely set you apart. Avoid slogans. "Scheduling software for independent physiotherapy clinics in the UK" is a fact an engine can repeat; "the future of care" is not.

Then make your own properties match it: homepage, About page, pricing page, social profiles, app store listings, business profiles and author bios. This is the core of entity work, and our guide to entity SEO for AEO goes deeper on how engines connect a name to a thing.

Now map each question from step 1 to one page on your site. Where no page exists, that gap is your content plan. Where a page exists, rewrite its opening so the first sentence answers the question directly, in words a reader could quote without needing the rest of the page. Then support it: the reasoning, the numbers, the exceptions, the comparison table.

Write the supporting detail as specific, checkable statements. A sentence such as "plans start at a published monthly price and include unlimited users" is easier for an engine to lift than a paragraph about flexibility. The Generative Engine Optimization paper found that targeted content changes can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses, and that the effect varies by domain, so test changes on your own questions rather than assuming one recipe fits.

Substance matters more than format. Google's guidance on succeeding in AI search tells site owners to focus on unique, non-commodity content that visitors will find helpful and satisfying. A page that restates what ten other sites already say gives an engine no reason to cite you over them. First-hand data, clear pricing, real comparisons and honest limitations do.

Structured data turns the facts from step 3 into a machine-readable format. Start with Organization markup on your homepage. Google's Organization structured data documentation says it can help Google understand your organization's administrative details and disambiguate it in search results, and that there are no required properties, so add every relevant one you can state truthfully.

Use the sameAs property to connect your brand to its other profiles. Schema.org defines sameAs as the URL of a reference page that unambiguously indicates the item's identity, such as a Wikipedia page, Wikidata entry or official website. That is exactly the link an engine needs to treat your site and your profiles as one entity.

Then add page-level types where they truthfully apply: Product or Service on offer pages, Article on guides, FAQPage where a page genuinely answers a list of questions. The rule that matters most is consistency. Google's AI features guide lists making sure your structured data matches the visible text on the page as a best practice. Markup that claims something the page does not show is worse than none. Our structured data guide has templates.

Engines are more confident about a claim when independent sources agree on it. This is cross-source corroboration, and it is the step most teams leave out because it cannot be done from a CMS.

Go back to the sources column from step 1. The third-party sites that engines cite for your questions, such as review platforms, industry directories, comparison articles, trade publications and community threads, are where your facts need to appear. Work through them in order of how often they are cited: claim and complete your profiles, correct outdated descriptions, ask satisfied customers for reviews on the platforms that show up, and pitch useful data or commentary to the publications that write the comparisons.

Keep every description consistent with the fact sheet. A directory listing that still uses your old category name or an old price is a vote for the wrong answer. This step is slow, and nobody can guarantee a mention, but it compounds: each accurate third-party page makes the next answer a little more likely to describe you correctly.

Re-run the exact question set from step 1 and compare it line by line with your baseline. Look for three kinds of movement: questions where you are now named, answers that describe you more accurately, and new pages of yours in the cited sources. Treat a single good day with suspicion and look for changes that hold over several checks.

Use the platform reports that exist. In February 2026 Microsoft introduced AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools, which shows how often your content is cited in generative answers across Copilot and Bing's AI summaries. On June 3, 2026, Google announced Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console, with impressions for AI Overviews and AI Mode; as of August 31, 2026 they are available to all websites. For ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity you still need to ask the questions directly.

Then iterate. Pick the questions where you are closest to being named, make one change per page, and give crawlers time to pick it up before judging it. Our guide to measuring AEO covers which metrics to keep month to month, and the engine-specific guides on Google AI Overviews and getting cited by Perplexity cover the details that differ by platform.

This page is the end-to-end sequence. If your priority is a single engine, the ChatGPT optimization checklist goes deeper on that platform's crawlers and formatting. If you are a small team doing everything yourself, the DIY SEO and AEO plan spreads the basics over four weeks. Both fit inside the seven steps above.

Where AEO Grader fits is steps 1 and 7. The free scan at /tool needs no signup and returns, in about a minute, an AEO score with a four-pillar breakdown, one grounded Gemini check with Google Search, an action plan with code snippets, and a competitor and sentiment snapshot; its per-engine view is an estimate. The $10 one-time report asks real buyer questions to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini live, shows each engine's actual answer with its sources, your share of voice against competitors and a prioritized site audit, and includes one re-scan within 14 days. Monthly tracking at $9/month repeats the four-engine report every month and emails you what changed. None of it guarantees a citation; it tells you where you stand so you can work the steps in the right order.