AEO
What is AEO, and does it matter yet?
A growing share of searches never produce a click. Someone asks ChatGPT for a plumber and calls whoever it names. There is no list to rank in — there is one answer.
4 min read · Updated October 2026
The short version
AEO is structuring your website so AI answer tools can read it, trust it and quote it accurately. In practice that means plain question-and-answer writing, schema markup, consistent facts and a crawler policy that lets them in. It is cheap to do properly and most of your competitors have not touched it.
SEO assumes a list. Ten blue links, and your job is to be near the top. That assumption is quietly breaking.
Google now answers a large share of searches with an AI summary above the results. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot answer questions directly and name businesses. In all of these there is no list to rank in. There is one answer, and either you are in it or you are not.
How AEO differs from SEO
| SEO | AEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank your page in a list | Get your business named inside an answer |
| Unit | The page | The sentence or fact |
| Measured by | Position, clicks, impressions | Whether you are cited, which is mostly unmeasurable |
| Rewards | Authority, links, relevance | Clarity, structure, consistency |
They overlap heavily — a site that is good for SEO is usually a decent starting point for AEO. But they are not the same job. SEO optimises for ranking. AEO optimises for being extracted.
What AEO actually involves
Answer the question first
Language models lift short, self-contained answers. If someone asks “how much does a website cost in Australia”, the page most likely to be quoted is the one that opens with a sentence answering it — not one that builds to the answer after four paragraphs of preamble.
Put the answer in the first two sentences under the heading. Then explain.
Schema markup
Schema is structured data in your page’s code that states facts explicitly rather than leaving them to be inferred: this is a business, these are its hours, this is its price, this is a question and this is its answer.
For a local service business the ones that matter are LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList. It is invisible to visitors and does real work for machines.
An llms.txt file
A plain-text file at the root of your site summarising what the business is, what it sells, what it costs and where it operates. It is a young convention rather than a standard, and it is cheap — one file, no maintenance burden.
A crawler policy that lets them in
Plenty of sites block AI crawlers in robots.txt without realising, usually because a plugin or a host added a blanket rule. If GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot cannot read your site, you cannot appear in their answers.
Worth checking today
Open yourdomain.com.au/robots.txt. If you see Disallow rules for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended, you have opted out of AI search without deciding to.
Facts that agree with each other
If your website says you open at 7am, your Google listing says 8am and a directory says 8:30am, a model has three conflicting sources and will often use none of them. Consistency is a ranking factor for machines in a way it never quite was for people.
Prices and service areas as text
Anything inside an image is invisible. Prices in a graphic, service areas on a map image, hours in a designed banner — all unreadable. If it matters, it needs to exist as text.
Being straight about what nobody can promise
There is no AEO dashboard. No rank tracker, no bid, no reporting that tells you how often ChatGPT recommended you. The systems change every few months and none of them publish their criteria.
Anyone selling guaranteed placement in AI answers is making it up, in exactly the way guaranteed Google rankings were made up fifteen years ago.
So why do it
Because it is cheap, it overlaps with work that helps you anyway, and the competitive window is open. Most small businesses have done none of it. The cost of being early here is a few hundred dollars; the cost of being late is however long it takes to catch up.
Does it matter yet?
For most Sydney service businesses, right now, the honest answer is: less than your Google Business Profile and far less than whether your site converts. If you have to choose, fix those first.
But AEO is not a monthly cost. It is largely one-off structural work, and the things it asks for — clear answers, consistent facts, clean markup — make your site better for humans and for normal search at the same time. There is no real downside case.
A reasonable order to do it in
- 01Check robots.txt is not blocking AI crawlers. Free, five minutes.
- 02Make your name, address, phone and hours identical everywhere.
- 03Write genuine question-and-answer content for the things customers actually ask.
- 04Add schema markup for your business, services and FAQs.
- 05Publish an llms.txt file.
- 06Get prices and service areas out of images and into text.
Items one, two and six you can do yourself this week. The rest is a few hundred dollars of work, once.