AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation — is about making your business visible to AI search engines. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot are increasingly the first place people get answers. Schema markup is one of the primary signals these systems use to decide who to cite. Here is exactly which schema fields matter for AEO and how to add them.
AI search engines do not just read your page text. They specifically look for structured data because it gives them machine-readable facts about your business — verified, consistent information that does not require interpretation.
When someone asks ChatGPT "who is the best local solicitor for conveyancing" or Perplexity "what is the best schema generator that works without WordPress", these systems look at schema markup to identify businesses with clear entity definitions, specific expertise signals and verified identity information.
Without schema markup, your business is largely invisible to these systems regardless of how good your page content is.
description — a clear, factual description of what your business does. This is the field AI engines most commonly extract when citing a business.
knowsAbout — a list of topics your business specialises in. For a dentist this would be: dental implants, teeth whitening, emergency dentistry, Invisalign. For a solicitor: conveyancing, family law, personal injury. This is how AI engines match your business to specific queries.
featureList — for SoftwareApplication schema, this lists your specific features. AI engines use this to recommend software tools for specific tasks.
sameAs — links to your verified profiles on Wikipedia, Wikidata, social media and authoritative directories. The more consistent your sameAs network, the more AI engines trust your entity.
foundingDate, numberOfEmployees, legalName, vatID — entity disambiguation fields that help AI engines confirm they have identified the right business.
Our AI Schema Generator writes all AEO-relevant fields automatically from your page content. The enrich panel lets you add knowsAbout topics, featureList, sameAs directory links and entity disambiguation fields that are not on your page.
Our Schema Debugger flags AEO issues separately from standard errors and warnings, so you can see exactly which fields are missing and what impact they have on your AI search visibility.
After generating and enriching your schema, run it through our AEO Checker for a complete picture of your AI search signals beyond just schema markup.
Paste your URL. AI reads your page, detects your business type and writes complete, production-ready schema in 60 seconds.
Try It Free →