# The AEO Blueprint: Six Steps to Getting Cited by AI Engines > A six-step plan: audit where AI names you, restructure content for extraction, add schema, build topical authority, earn mentions and monitor. URL: https://llmagnet.com/blog/aeo-blueprint Author: Ben Cohen, Founder & CEO at LLMagnet Published: 2026-05-09 Updated: 2026-11-10 Category: Guides To get cited by AI engines, make your pages reachable, put direct answers at the top, back claims with sources, and earn mentions on other sites. These six steps are the order we’d do it in, and they sit on top of your SEO rather than replacing it. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), also called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), is the work of becoming a source AI answers draw on. Our [look at what gets a page cited](https://llmagnet.com/blog/what-gets-a-page-cited-by-chatgpt) covers the evidence in more depth. This post is the plan. ## Contents 1. The Plan at a Glance 2. Step 1: Measure Where You Stand 3. Step 2: Restructure Your Content for Extraction 4. Step 3: Add Schema Where It Describes Real Facts 5. Step 4: Cover Your Topic in Depth 6. Step 5: Earn Mentions on Other Sites 7. Step 6: Speed Up Discovery and Monitor Monthly 8. What Not to Do 9. Start This Week 10. FAQ ## The Plan at a Glance ![Six steps in order: measure where you stand, restructure for extraction, add schema for real facts, cover the topic in depth, earn mentions elsewhere, then speed discovery and monitor monthly.](https://llmagnet.com/images/blog/charts/aeo-blueprint-six-steps.png) *The order is our own judgment.* The order is deliberate. Rewriting a page bots can’t reach is wasted, and earning mentions for a site with nothing worth citing brings little back. If you’ve already done a step well, skip it, but don’t skip the measurement. Without a baseline you won’t know whether anything worked. ## Step 1: Measure Where You Stand Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini and ask the questions your customers ask: - “What’s the best [your product category] for [use case]?” - “How do I solve [problem your business solves]?” - “Compare [your brand] vs [competitor]” - “Is [your brand] a good choice for [use case]?” Run each prompt several times and record how often you appear, and who appears instead. One run proves little: [SparkToro’s research](https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-ais-are-highly-inconsistent-when-recommending-brands-or-products-marketers-should-take-care-when-tracking-ai-visibility/) (not peer reviewed) found less than a 1-in-100 chance that ChatGPT or Google’s AI would give the same list of brands in any two responses. Share of appearances across repeated runs is the number to track. Record five things per run: the prompt, the engine, whether you were named, whether your URL was cited, and who else appeared. Named and cited are different results. Named without a link means the engine knows you but didn’t use your page. Be honest about what a small test can show. SparkToro’s authors ran each prompt 60 to 100 times, say that’s usually the minimum for sound figures, and call the exact number an open question. Three runs by hand tells you whether you’re absent or present. It can’t tell you a five-point rise is real. Here’s how a first scorecard might read. The company and figures below are made up for illustration: ten prompts, three runs each, so 30 runs per engine. | Engine | Tessel appears | Top competitor appears | What it suggests | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | ChatGPT | 3 of 30 | 21 of 30 | Biggest gap. Check crawler access and indexing in Bing | | Perplexity | 11 of 30 | 14 of 30 | Close already. Passage-level edits may be enough | | Gemini | 6 of 30 | 20 of 30 | Check Search Console for indexing problems | | Claude | 2 of 30 | 18 of 30 | Treat as a brand-mention gap, and revisit after Step 5 | While you’re there, check access. OpenAI says [OAI-SearchBot controls whether you appear in ChatGPT search answers](https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots), and Perplexity [recommends allowing PerplexityBot](https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots). Make sure neither robots.txt nor your CDN blocks them. To confirm it worked, search your server logs for OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot and check that they get 200 responses. A 403 or a challenge page means a block your robots file won’t show. Allow a day for changes: [OpenAI says about 24 hours](https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots) and [Perplexity says up to 24 hours](https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots). Perplexity also warns that Cloudflare’s Bot Fight Mode can still challenge its crawler when a custom rule allows it, and that its IP ranges change, so check the logs again after any security update. One common mistake: blocking GPTBot does not remove you from ChatGPT search, and allowing it doesn’t put you there. GPTBot is for model training. OAI-SearchBot decides search visibility. ## Step 2: Restructure Your Content for Extraction Perplexity says it [scores results at both the document and sub-document level](https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/architecting-and-evaluating-an-ai-first-search-api), so each section has to work on its own. Four changes we’d make first: 1. **Put the answer first.** State it in the first one or two sentences of the section. 2. **Use headings that say what the section answers.** “How pricing works for teams over 50” tells a reader and a machine more than “Overview”. A question form is optional: [SE Ranking’s ChatGPT study](https://seranking.com/blog/how-to-optimize-for-chatgpt/) (vendor data) found question-style titles and H1s averaged 3.4 citations against 4.3 for plain ones, and its authors call the format context-dependent. 3. **Attribute your data.** In the [Princeton GEO study](https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735), adding statistics gained about 31% and adding quotations about 41% on its word-count measure. Those are tests on a benchmark, with only a 200-query check on Perplexity, so they aren’t proof for live engines, but sourced claims also help your readers. 4. **Answer real follow-up questions.** Add an FAQ only where people actually ask those questions. SE Ranking found pages with FAQ sections averaged about the same citations as pages without (3.8 against 4.1), so don’t add one for its own sake. Don’t overdo the splitting. Google says [you don’t need to chunk content](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide) into small pieces, and SE Ranking’s data on section length (a correlation) points the same way. ![Average ChatGPT citations by words between headings: under 50 words 2.7, 120 to 180 words 4.6, over 180 words 5.7.](https://llmagnet.com/images/blog/charts/aeo-blueprint-section-length.png) *Source: SE Ranking, November 2025. Vendor data. Correlation only.* SE Ranking cautions that the over-180 result may reflect thorough coverage rather than readability. The safe reading is narrow: sections of a sentence or two give an engine little to work with. Write a section as long as its answer needs, with the answer at the top. There’s experimental support for restructuring. In [GEO-SFE, a March 2026 preprint](https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29979), restructuring 200 benchmark articles raised the citation rate across six engines from 45.0% to 52.8%. The authors credit document structure with about 45% of the gain, chunking 40% and emphasis 15%. Here’s what the rewrite looks like. The company and figures are made up for illustration. | Before | After | | --- | --- | | **Overview.** Modern teams need flexible tools. Tessel helps you get more from your schedule with smart features that grow with you. | **How shift scheduling works for teams of 20 to 200.** Tessel builds a weekly rota from staff availability and labor rules, then texts it to each employee. In our 2026 survey of 140 retail managers, rota building fell from 5.1 hours a week to 1.4. Pricing starts at $3 per employee per month. | Work through your pages in revenue order, and within that, start where you aren’t already winning. In the Princeton benchmark, with every source in an answer edited at once, adding citations raised visibility by 115.1% at rank 5 and cut it by 30.3% at rank 1, so test edits on pages behind the leaders first. ## Step 3: Add Schema Where It Describes Real Facts Evidence on schema is mixed and depends on the schema type and the engine. Google says [no special schema.org markup is needed](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide) for its AI features. Add [structured data](https://schema.org/) because it describes your business accurately and earns rich results where they’re available, and use [JSON-LD](https://json-ld.org/) so it’s easy to maintain. [Ahrefs’ May 2026 test](https://ahrefs.com/blog/schema-ai-citations/) (vendor data) is the closest thing to a controlled result. Across 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD and 4,000 controls, AI Mode (+2.4%) and ChatGPT (+2.2%) were indistinguishable from zero, and AI Overviews fell 4.6%. Ahrefs can’t say schema caused that decline, and it tested only pages AI already cited. Don’t schedule schema work expecting more citations. - **Organization:** your name, logo and social profiles, on the homepage. - **Product:** price, availability and reviews, if you sell anything. - **Article:** author and dates on editorial content. Start with Organization. [Google’s documentation](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/organization) lists no required properties, recommends the home page or a single page that describes your organization, and suggests leading with name, address or telephone, and url or logo. Use `sameAs` to link your profiles on other sites. The details below are made up: ``` ``` Check it with the Rich Results Test, then use URL Inspection to see what Google sees. Don’t add FAQ or HowTo markup expecting search features. Google [limited FAQ rich results to well-known government and health sites and deprecated HowTo results](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/08/howto-faq-changes) in 2023. Make sure markup matches the visible text. Our [review of the schema studies](https://llmagnet.com/blog/schema-markup-ai-citations) goes through the conflicting results. ## Step 4: Cover Your Topic in Depth Engines split one question into several searches. In [AirOps’ March 2026 report](https://www.airops.com/report/influence-of-retrieval-fanout-and-google-serps-in-chatgpt) (vendor data), 95% of ChatGPT’s fan-out queries had no monthly search volume by traditional metrics, so a keyword list will miss them. Depth is our best guess at how to show up for the ones you can’t see. Match the format to the intent. AirOps found comparison queries split into sub-queries 38.4% of the time, and it recommends depth on the core topic for informational queries and modular coverage (pricing, features, alternatives, comparisons) for commercial ones. If you sell project management software, one post about project management won’t cover it. Write a main page on the topic, then separate pages for task delegation, Gantt charts, agile, remote teams and templates, and link them together. Start with the questions you hear on sales calls. Google draws a limit here. Its guide says creating pages for every query variation or fan-out query to manipulate rankings can violate the scaled content abuse policy, and that more pages don’t make a site higher quality. Use a simple rule: a new page needs a different answer, a different reader, or enough material that it would crowd out the main page. Otherwise add a section. | Business | Build first | Skip | | --- | --- | --- | | **B2B software** | Pricing, integrations, security, alternatives, comparisons | A page for each keyword variant | | **Ecommerce** | Buying guides, full specs, accurate Merchant Center feed | Copied manufacturer descriptions | | **Local services** | Complete Business Profile, one strong page per service | Near-identical pages for each town | | **Small sites** | One narrow topic, finished before starting another | Broad topics dominated by large sites | A good sign is pages other than your main one starting to appear in your Step 1 runs. ## Step 5: Earn Mentions on Other Sites In [Ahrefs’ study of 75,000 brands](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overview-brand-correlation/) (vendor data), branded web mentions correlated with Google AI Overview visibility at 0.664, against 0.218 for backlinks. That’s correlation, and big brands get more of everything, but it’s the strongest correlation in the study. Google also warns that [manufactured mentions don’t help much](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide), so the mentions have to be real. ![Spearman correlation with AI Overview mentions across 75,000 brands: branded web mentions 0.664, branded anchors 0.527, branded search volume 0.392, Domain Rating 0.326, backlinks 0.218.](https://llmagnet.com/images/blog/charts/aeo-blueprint-brand-signals.png) *Source: Ahrefs, May 2025. Vendor data. Brands with a Domain Rating above 40. Five of the factors it tested.* - Publish original data from your customers or product. - Offer quotes to journalists who cover your industry. - Write for publications your buyers already read. - Take part in the forums and communities where your category gets discussed. We think original data is the most durable of these, because other writers need a source to cite when they use the number. We’d budget one person and a month. Pick one number nobody else has, such as a median from your product data. Publish it on its own page with the sample, the date and how you calculated it. Then send it to five writers who covered the topic in the last year, with one sentence on why it changes what they wrote. Where you earn mentions depends on the engine and the buyer. In [Profound’s data on 680 million citations](https://www.tryprofound.com/blog/ai-platform-citation-patterns) (vendor data, August 2024 to June 2025), G2 and Forbes were among ChatGPT’s most cited sources, Reddit and YouTube led Google AI Overviews, and Yelp and TripAdvisor made Perplexity’s top 10. SE Ranking found domains with profiles on several review platforms averaged 4.6 to 6.3 ChatGPT citations, against 1.8 without. Both are observations, not proof that a profile causes citations, but a complete profile is cheap. ## Step 6: Speed Up Discovery and Monitor Monthly [IndexNow](https://www.indexnow.org/faq) tells participating engines that a page changed. They include Amazon, Bing, Naver, Seznam, Yandex and Yep. Google isn’t listed, and IndexNow doesn’t guarantee indexing. We think it’s worth enabling because ChatGPT search has [used Bing as a provider, as TechTarget reported](https://www.techtarget.com/WhatIs/feature/SearchGPT-explained-Details-about-OpenAIs-search-engine). Check whether your CMS or CDN supports it. If yours doesn’t, setup is short: generate a key, save it as a text file named after the key at your site root, and POST changed URLs to `api.indexnow.org/indexnow`. [IndexNow’s documentation](https://www.indexnow.org/documentation) says a 200 means the URL was received, and a 202 means it was received but the key check is still pending. Repeat your Step 1 prompts every month. Google’s [Generative AI performance report](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/16984139?hl=en) in Search Console shows impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country and device. [LLMagnet](https://ai-visibility.llmagnet.com) measures AI visibility across seven engines, and its agent prepares fixes for your approval. Google Alerts on your brand and competitors will show who is earning mentions. | Measure | Where | What to look for | | --- | --- | --- | | **Share of appearances** | Your Step 1 prompts, by engine | A rise larger than the swing between repeat runs | | **Named against cited** | The same runs | More linked citations, not only mentions | | **AI impressions by page** | Search Console | Important pages that show none | | **Citations by page** | [Bing’s AI Performance report](https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/February-2026/Introducing-AI-Performance-in-Bing-Webmaster-Tools-Public-Preview) | Copilot, Bing summaries and select partners only. Don’t read it as ChatGPT data | | **Crawler status codes** | Server logs | New 403s after a security change | | **AI referrals** | Analytics | Landing pages and conversions. Clicks undercount exposure | ## What Not to Do **Don’t expect citations from llms.txt.** [SE Ranking’s study of nearly 300,000 domains](https://seranking.com/blog/llms-txt/) found no measurable link to citations, and [Google Search doesn’t use the file](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide). It may still give agents a useful map, so it can be worth a few minutes, as our [llms.txt breakdown](https://llmagnet.com/blog/llms-txt-ai-citations) explains. Do the work above first. **Don’t abandon SEO.** In AirOps’ data, pages ranking first on Google were cited at a 43.2% rate, 3.5 times the rate for pages beyond the top 20. Google also says [its AI features run on its core ranking systems](https://llmagnet.com/blog/google-ai-search-guide). **Don’t change everything at once.** If you rewrite pages, add schema and start outreach in the same month, you won’t know which one moved the number. Stagger the work, and note the date of each change. **Don’t judge a result from one chat.** Answers vary too much. Use the same prompts, the same number of runs and the same engines each month. ## Start This Week 1. Check that robots.txt and your CDN allow Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. 2. Run ten customer questions through four engines, three times each, and record the results. 3. Rewrite your main product page so the first two sentences say what it is and who it’s for. 4. Add Organization schema to your homepage. 5. Add one sourced number or attributed quote to each of your top five pages. ## FAQ ### What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)? AEO, also called generative engine optimization (GEO), is the work of making your site a source that AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews quote and cite. It’s a layer on top of SEO, not a replacement. ### How do I find out whether AI engines cite my site? Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini the questions your customers ask, run each several times, and record how often you and your competitors appear. Answers vary a lot between runs, so count appearances instead of relying on one result. ### How should I structure content so AI can cite it? Put the direct answer in the first one or two sentences of each section, use headings that say what the section answers, attribute your data to sources, and make each section understandable without the rest of the page. ### Which schema markup should I start with? Organization schema for your brand, Product schema if you sell anything, and Article schema on editorial content. Google says no special markup is needed for its AI features, so add schema because it describes real facts, not because it guarantees citations. ### What is topical authority and why does it matter for AI? It means covering a subject in depth across linked pages. AI engines split one question into several searches, and AirOps found 95% of ChatGPT’s fan-out queries had no measurable search volume, so depth may help you match searches a keyword tool can’t show. ### Should I invest in llms.txt? Only lightly. SE Ranking’s analysis of nearly 300,000 domains found no measurable link between having llms.txt and being cited, and Google Search doesn’t use it. It may still give agents a useful map. ### How many times should I run each prompt? Enough to separate a real change from noise. SparkToro’s authors suggest 60 to 100 runs per prompt for sound figures and call the exact number an open question. A few runs by hand only shows whether you are present or absent.