AEO: How to Make Your Site Visible to AI Search Engines
Learn what AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) is, why AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Perplexity may not be citing your site, and how to fix it. Step by step for complete beginners.
What you will learn in this guide
- What AEO is and how it differs from traditional SEO
- Why AI chatbots may be ignoring your website
- What llms.txt is and why you need one
- How structured data helps AI understand your content
- How to audit your AI search visibility
- The quickest fixes to improve your AI citation rate
1 What is AEO?
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimisation. While traditional SEO focuses on ranking in Google's blue link results, AEO focuses on being cited by AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Claude when they answer questions.
2 Why AI tools might be ignoring your site
AI crawlers are different from Googlebot. They may be blocked by your robots.txt, unable to read your content, or simply not find your pages authoritative enough to cite. Common reasons:
| Issue | Effect |
|---|---|
| AI bots blocked in robots.txt | ChatGPT, Perplexity etc cannot crawl your site |
| No llms.txt file | AI tools have no guide to your most important content |
| No FAQ or HowTo schema | AI cannot identify question-answer content on your pages |
| Thin or vague content | AI tools prefer direct, specific answers to questions |
| No author information | E-E-A-T signals are weak — AI prefers expert sources |
3 What is llms.txt?
llms.txt is a file you put at the root of your website (like robots.txt) that tells AI language models what your site is about, which pages are most important, and how to understand your content. It is the AI equivalent of a sitemap.
4 How to improve your AEO score
- 1Run the AEO CheckerGo to content-tools.html#aeo and enter your page URL. The tool checks bot access, structured data, FAQ schema and generates your llms.txt.
- 2Allow AI bots in robots.txtCheck your robots.txt does not block GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot or Google-Extended. If it does, remove those disallow rules.
- 3Add FAQ schema to your key pagesAdd FAQPage schema markup to pages that answer common questions. This directly signals to AI tools which questions your page addresses.
- 4Deploy your llms.txt fileUpload the generated llms.txt to your server root. Verify it is accessible at https://yoursite.com/llms.txt