What is AEO in 2026?

AEO - Answer Engine Optimization - is the discipline of making your content citable by AI answer engines. In 2026 those engines are Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, and a small cohort of specialised tools (You.com, Brave, Kagi). The goal is no longer a blue-link ranking. The goal is to be the sentence an LLM quotes when someone asks a question.

How AEO differs from classic SEO

Classic SEO optimises for keyword match and backlink authority. AEO optimises for extractability - the ease with which an LLM can locate, lift, and attribute a specific answer from your page. The two are not in conflict. Most AEO work is SEO work done with attention to structure: clean headings, short direct-answer paragraphs near the top, FAQ blocks that pair a question with a two-sentence answer, and stat claims with visible citations.

The extractability checklist

When an LLM reads your page it is looking for three things:

1. Clean structure. A single H1, logical H2/H3s, FAQ blocks, numbered lists. Pages where the model has to infer boundaries are pages the model skips in favour of pages where boundaries are obvious. 2. Citable sentences. A sentence that reads like a quotable claim - "Citevera's average scan takes 52 seconds end-to-end" - is more likely to be pulled verbatim than a paragraph that buries the number in prose. 3. Source signals. Pages that cite external sources with inline links tend to get cited in return. Pages that make assertive claims without sources tend to get discarded.

The technical layer

Two files matter more than most people realise: robots.txt and /llms.txt.

Your robots.txt needs explicit allow rules for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, anthropic-ai, Applebot-Extended, and a few others. Default silence often reads as "blocked" in the policy review some of these crawlers run before they index you.

Your /llms.txt is the 2026 equivalent of robots.txt for content hierarchy: a Markdown file at the root that tells LLMs which pages are canonical, which are docs, which are blog, and which should be prioritised for citation. Publishing one is a five-minute job with outsized impact.

What doesn't work

Stuffing an FAQ at the bottom of every page. LLMs are good at recognising filler. If your FAQ doesn't actually answer the page's title, it hurts more than it helps.

How Citevera scores this

Citevera's AEO axis scores five clusters: structure, direct-answer density, FAQ coverage, stat citations, and JSON-LD. A site with clean headings but no FAQ blocks and no citations scores in the 50s. A site with all of the above usually clears 80. The fix pack Citevera generates after each scan is the delta between where you are and what the checklist expects.