What is AEO?

AEO stands for AI Engine Optimization — the practice of making your website visible and citable by AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google’s AI Overviews.

Why AEO matters

AI engines are becoming a primary way people discover information online. When someone asks ChatGPT “what’s the best project management tool?” or Perplexity “how do I set up a Next.js app?”, AI engines decide which sources to cite.

Sites that are structured for AI visibility get cited. Sites that aren’t get ignored.

How AEO differs from SEO

SEO optimizes for search engine crawlers and ranking algorithms. AEO optimizes for language models and AI retrieval systems.

	SEO	AEO
Target	Google, Bing crawlers	ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude
Goal	Rank in search results	Get cited in AI responses
Signals	Backlinks, keywords, page speed	Structure, schema, llms.txt, FAQ markup
Output	Meta tags, sitemaps	llms.txt, schema.json, robots directives

AEO complements SEO — you should do both.

What AEOrank does

AEOrank measures your site’s AI visibility across 12 dimensions and generates 8 files that AI engines look for:

1. Scans your site (up to 50 pages, under 30 seconds)
2. Scores your AI visibility from 0-100
3. Generates the files AI engines need to find and cite you

The CLI is free, open source, and MIT-licensed. No account required.

The 8 generated files

AEOrank produces these files tailored to your specific site:

• llms.txt — a structured overview of your site for language models
• llms-full.txt — full-text content for comprehensive indexing
• CLAUDE.md — repository context for AI coding assistants
• schema.json — Organization, WebSite, and FAQ structured data
• robots-patch.txt — directives for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot
• faq-blocks.html — speakable FAQ schema markup
• citation-anchors.html — heading anchors that make content citable
• sitemap-ai.xml — AI-optimized sitemap with content hints

Deploy these files on your site and AI engines will have everything they need to understand and cite your content.