AEO checklist: 15 fixes to get cited more by AI search

AEO — answer engine optimization — is the work of getting your business cited when AI tools answer your customers' questions. We've written the explainers — what AEO is and why it matters, the GEO research in depth, Google's AI Overviews specifically. This is the execution version: every recommendation that survives fact-checking, compressed into one working list. It's ordered by evidence strength — the first section rests on controlled experiments, the last on reasonable inference — and it's honest about which popular tactics didn't make the cut.

Page-level: the experimentally supported five

• 1. Put concrete statistics in your key pages — prices, timelines, counts, results. The strongest tested tactic in the Princeton GEO study, worth up to 40% more visibility in AI answers.
• 2. Add real quotations — named customers, partners, or your own on-record judgment. Similar experimental lift, and it's evidence a competitor can't paste.
• 3. Cite your sources — link the standard, study, or regulation behind any claim you didn't originate. Cited content gets cited.
• 4. Write a self-contained answer under every question-shaped heading — two or three sentences that survive being lifted out alone. Summarizers extract passages, not pages.
• 5. Delete keyword stuffing wherever you find it — the one tested tactic that scored below doing nothing.

Site-level: the qualifying round

• 6. Be indexed and rankable — AI answers are assembled from search indexes; ordinary SEO is the entry fee, and Google says explicitly that no special optimization beyond it is required.
• 7. Don't block the AI crawlers you want citations from — check your robots.txt for accidental blocks on OAI-SearchBot and friends. (Blocking training bots is a separate, legitimate choice; know which rule does which.)
• 8. Keep structured data consistent with what the page visibly says — Google's stated requirement; treat schema as bookkeeping, not magic.
• 9. Keep key pages current — stale prices and dated references make a page unquotable for present-tense questions; refresh on a schedule.
• 10. Clear heading hierarchy, short sections, lists where content is genuinely list-shaped — structure is what extraction runs on.

Beyond your site: where answer engines learn who you are

• 11. Keep your Google Business Profile complete and current — AI assistants recommending local businesses lean on the same public signals as local search.
• 12. Maintain your review presence — steady, replied-to reviews on the platforms your industry uses; review text is source material for 'best X near me' answers.
• 13. Be present where your category is discussed — the forums, communities, and directories AI systems read. Genuine participation, not drive-by link-dropping; citation sources shift with every model update, so breadth beats betting on one platform.

Measurement: know if any of it works

• 14. Track AI referrals in analytics — visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com. Small numbers, but they're the direct signal, and ChatGPT tags its referrals so they're easy to segment.
• 15. Once a month, ask the assistants your ten money questions — incognito, the way a customer would phrase them. Note who gets recommended and cited. If it isn't you, compare your page against items 1–5; add an 'AI assistant' option to your how-did-you-hear survey to catch what referrer data can't see.

Fifteen boxes, one theme: be findable, be quotable, be present, and check. Everything else sold as AEO is one of these wearing a markup.

Deliberately not on this list

• llms.txt — Google has said it doesn't use it and isn't planning to. Harmless, pointless.
• Special 'AI schema' packages — no platform requires schema beyond the standard kind, and vendors claiming a markup type multiplies citations are extrapolating from their own marketing.
• Guaranteed AI visibility services — citation patterns shift with model updates nobody controls; the guarantee red flag transfers to AEO intact.
• Rewriting everything 'for AI' — the tested tactics above are also just good writing for humans; a separate AI version of your content is effort spent making the same page twice.

Time-boxed honestly: items 6–10 are your existing SEO checklist wearing a new hat, items 11–13 are an afternoon plus habits you likely half-have, and items 1–5 fold into your normal writing and refresh workflow. AEO as a project is small; AEO as a reason to finally put real numbers and real evidence on your pages is the whole point.