Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is about making your business visible to AI search engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot. Schema markup is the foundation of AEO. It gives these systems machine-readable facts about your business that they use to decide who to cite in response to queries. Here is the complete AEO schema guide.
Traditional SEO targets Google rankings for specific keywords. AEO targets AI engine citations for broad queries. When someone asks ChatGPT "what is the best schema generator for small businesses" or Perplexity "which UK estate agents specialise in rural properties", these systems look for businesses with strong entity definitions and verified presence across authoritative sources.
Schema markup provides the structured entity definition. sameAs links provide the cross-source verification. knowsAbout and featureList provide the specificity that matches your business to particular queries.
Layer 1 — Entity identification: @type (your specific business type), name, legalName, url, foundingDate. These tell AI engines who you are.
Layer 2 — Entity description: description (factual two to three sentence summary), knowsAbout (specific topic list), featureList (for software). These tell AI engines what you do.
Layer 3 — Entity verification: sameAs (GBP, Wikipedia, Wikidata, LinkedIn, authoritative directories), aggregateRating (verified review score), vatID, leiCode. These tell AI engines you are legitimate and consistent.
Layer 4 — Entity context: address, geo, telephone, email, openingHours. These tell AI engines where and when you operate.
All four layers working together create a complete entity profile that AI engines can confidently cite.
Our AI Schema Generator writes all four layers automatically. The enrich panel has dedicated sections for each layer — description and knowsAbout for entity description, Profiles and Listings for entity verification, and the standard fields for entity context.
Our Schema Debugger flags AEO issues as a separate category so you can see exactly which AEO fields are missing and what impact they have. Our AEO Checker gives you a complete picture beyond schema markup — content structure, entity signals and citation readiness.
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