Everything we know about Answer Engine Optimization.
Primers, technical write-ups, and the full rubric behind the AEO Site Checker. Each article corresponds to one or more checks the auditor runs — read first, fix second, re-audit third.
Cloudflare bot protection and AEO — the silent killer
Cloudflare's default bot challenge blocks the AI crawlers you want to be cited by. How to detect it, and the WAF rules to selectively unblock the major AI bots.
The Princeton GEO paper, summarized
What Aggarwal et al. (2024) actually measured about citation rates in generative search. The +41% statistics lift, the +28% quotation lift, and what the paper got wrong.
Front-loaded answers: the single highest-leverage AEO content fix
AI engines read the first ~200 words and stop. If your answer is buried in paragraph 7, you're invisible. How to rewrite so the model finds the answer immediately.
Why AI crawlers don't run JavaScript (and what to do about it)
AI search crawlers fetch raw HTML and don't render JavaScript. Why, how to tell if your site is invisible to them, and the fastest fixes for React, Vue, and SPA sites.
JSON-LD structured data for AI search
Which schema.org types AI engines actually read, where to put the JSON-LD, and the seven schemas that earn the most AEO points — copy-pasteable templates included.
How ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity actually crawl your site
A technical breakdown of how each major AI search engine fetches, parses, and selects sources to cite. From request headers to retrieval pipelines.
robots.txt for AI crawlers — the complete guide
Which AI crawlers exist, which ones actually matter, and the exact robots.txt allowlist to make sure ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews can read your site.
What is /llms.txt and how to write one
/llms.txt is a markdown file at your site root that gives AI agents a curated index of your most important pages. The format, rules, and a copy-pasteable template.
What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?
AEO is structuring a website so AI search engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — can crawl it and cite it. The four pillars, and how to start today.
AEO vs SEO: what's actually different
Answer Engine Optimization is not just SEO with a new name. The side-by-side: what's the same, what's different, and which old SEO tactics now hurt you.