AEO Is Just Good SEO

A question we hear a lot right now: do we need an AEO strategy? Answer engine optimization, sometimes called GEO, is the work of showing up in the answers ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI Overviews write. It's usually pitched as a new discipline, with new tools and a new budget line.

Our answer: AEO is mostly good SEO. Google now says so too. Its guide to generative AI features in Search, published in May, says optimizing for them "is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO."

What did change is how many places you need to show up in, and what counts as winning in each. A few pieces are new, and we cover those below. They're small.

Why AEO is mostly SEO

AI assistants don't know your site by heart. When someone asks a question that needs current information, the assistant runs a web search, reads a handful of the pages that come back, and writes an answer that cites some of them. If your page isn't indexed, isn't in those results, or doesn't answer the question clearly, the assistant has nothing to quote.

So the foundations are the same ones we've always worked on: pages that can be crawled and indexed, a structure that makes sense, titles that say what the page is, and content that answers a real question better than anything else in the results. Google's guide says the same, with one more point worth repeating. It asks for "non-commodity" content: a point of view or information that couldn't have come from anyone.

What changed: more engines, and the first page can be enough

The old target was narrow. You needed to be in Google's top two or three results, because that's where the clicks went.

Now there are more places to rank, and they don't all use Google. Google's AI features draw on Google's index. Copilot uses Bing. ChatGPT runs its own search crawler alongside other sources. Claude's web search reads Brave Search. A site that only watched Google rankings can be invisible in half of these and never know it.

The bar for each one is also different. An AI answer is assembled from several pages, so you don't have to be the top result to be quoted. A page in fifth place that answers the question in its first two sentences can be the one that gets cited. Being somewhere on the first page, with a clear answer, can be enough.

That changes the work in two practical ways:

• Check more than Google. Set up Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow, which notify Bing and Copilot when a page changes. Make sure OAI-SearchBot isn't blocked. Run your important questions through the assistants on a schedule and keep the results.

• Write the answer first. Put a direct answer under each heading, written so it still makes sense if it's lifted out on its own. Then say the rest.

What doesn't matter as much as people say

A lot of AEO advice is about markup. Some of it is out of date, and some was never true.

Structured data is useful, not magic. Article, Organization and Person markup tell search engines and AI tools what a page is and who wrote it, so they're still worth adding. But Google's guide is direct: "there's no special schema.org markup you need to add" for its AI features.

FAQs are for readers now. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results for every site on May 7, 2026. We still add FAQs to posts like this one, because a question with a two-sentence answer is easy for a reader to scan and easy for an assistant to quote. Don't expect them to change how your listing looks in Google.

You don't need to chop pages into fragments. Google says "there's no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI." One clear answer under each heading does the job.

Pages made to game AI answers are spam. Google's guide says pages built to manipulate rankings or AI responses fall under its scaled content abuse policy. A hundred near-identical pages written for assistants carry the same risk as a hundred written for Google.

What's actually new

Three things on our list didn't exist, or didn't matter, a couple of years ago.

Deciding which crawlers get in. AI companies run crawlers for different jobs: building a search index, answering a question right now, or collecting training data. On Cloudflare, AI Crawl Control shows which of them visit your site and lets you allow or block each one, on every plan. Managed robots.txt adds Content Signals, a way to say separately whether your content can be used for search, for AI answers, and for training. For most organizations that want to be found, the right setting lets search and answer crawlers in and makes a deliberate choice about training. Robots.txt is a request, not a lock, which is why the blocking happens in Cloudflare.

llms.txt. llms.txt is a short Markdown file at the root of your site that lists your most important pages for AI tools to read. Google says its search doesn't use it and that having one "will neither harm nor help" in Google. Other tools and agents do read it, and it takes about an hour to write. We add one, keep it current, and don't expect it to move rankings.

WebMCP. WebMCP is a proposed browser standard that lets a site tell an AI agent what it can do on a page, such as "search events" or "sign up for updates," instead of leaving the agent to guess at buttons. It's in an origin trial in Chrome and Edge, so it's early. If your site has forms people use and you want agents to use them reliably, it's worth trying now. If not, wait.

What to do this quarter

If you want a short list:

1. Fix the technical basics first: indexing, redirects, titles, speed. An assistant can't cite a page a search engine can't find.

2. Pick the 10 to 20 questions your audience asks most and make sure one page answers each, in the first two sentences under a matching heading.

3. Add Article, Organization and Person markup, plus FAQs where readers have follow-up questions.

4. Set up Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow, and check that the AI search crawlers aren't blocked.

5. Set your crawler policy in Cloudflare and publish an llms.txt.

6. Run your top questions through the assistants once a month and track who gets cited.

None of this needs a new tool. Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and your analytics cover most of the measurement. The work is in the pages.