Straight answers about AI search visibility
Short, sourced answers to the questions we actually get asked — including the ones where the honest answer is “there is no evidence for that”. Every claim links to the study or primary source behind it.
Fundamentals
What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?
Answer engine optimization is the practice of getting a brand mentioned and cited inside the answers AI assistants give — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews — rather than in a list of blue links.…
Read the full answerWhat is the difference between AEO, GEO and SEO?
They are three names for overlapping work aimed at different result surfaces. SEO (search engine optimization) earns positions in ranked lists of links. AEO (answer engine optimization) earns mentions and citations insid…
Read the full answerMeasurement
Tactics
What actually improves AI visibility, according to the evidence?
Third-party brand mentions are the strongest measured correlate of AI visibility — Ahrefs found branded web mentions correlating at 0.664 across 75,000 brands, roughly three times the correlation of backlinks at 0.218 —…
Read the full answerDoes schema markup help you get cited by AI?
There is no verified evidence that JSON-LD schema markup increases citations in AI answers, in either direction. It is widely recommended and cheap to implement, but our review of the published research found no controll…
Read the full answerWhich AI crawlers should you allow in robots.txt?
Allow the crawlers belonging to the assistants you want to be cited by: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User for ChatGPT; PerplexityBot for Perplexity; ClaudeBot for Claude; Google-Extended plus Googlebot for Gemini an…
Read the full answerHow do you get a brand cited by ChatGPT?
ChatGPT cites brands two ways: from what its underlying models learned during training, and — in search mode — from pages retrieved through its search index, which is built substantially on Microsoft Bing. That makes the…
Read the full answerHow do you get a brand cited by Perplexity?
Perplexity is the most citation-forward answer engine — nearly every claim in its answers carries a numbered source link — which makes it the most winnable. It retrieves live pages through its own crawler (PerplexityBot)…
Read the full answerWhat is llms.txt and should your site have one?
llms.txt is a proposed convention — published at llmstxt.org — for a markdown file at your site's root that gives LLMs a curated map of your most important content: what the site is, in one blockquote, followed by organi…
Read the full answerDoes IndexNow help AI visibility?
Indirectly but concretely, yes. IndexNow is a protocol — one POST request — that tells participating search engines a URL has been added or changed, instead of waiting for their crawlers to find it. Its participants incl…
Read the full answerWhich schema types actually matter for AEO?
Five carry most of the weight: Organization (who you are — the anchor of your entity graph), WebSite, Article or BlogPosting with real dates (freshness engines can parse), FAQPage (answers in exactly the shape answer eng…
Read the full answerTools & buying
Want these numbers for your own brand?
AE Ranking tracks your visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Mode — with the run count and confidence interval shown on every figure.
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