Answer engine optimization tool for AI Overviews and AI assistants

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the work of getting your page used as the answer rather than as a link someone might click. The surfaces are Google's AI Overviews, featured snippets, voice answers and the assistants, and what they have in common is that they read a page, lift the part that answers the question, and present it on their own.

That changes what a page has to do. Ranking rewards a page that covers a topic thoroughly. Being quoted rewards a page an engine can take a clean, self-contained answer out of without rewriting it. A long guide can hold a good position and still be passed over, because the answer is buried four paragraphs into a section and nothing in it stands alone.

The practical work is unglamorous and mostly structural: let the crawler in, say the answer plainly near the question it answers, mark up what the page is, and give the engine headings it can use to find the right section. None of that is new advice. What is new is that it now decides whether you appear at all on a surface that never shows a second result.

Three acronyms, one goal, and a lot of noise about which replaces which. The short version is that they are layers rather than rivals, and they differ mainly in what counts as success:

The useful takeaway for this page is narrow: one well-built page can satisfy all three, so AEO is rarely a separate project. It is a set of structural checks you run against pages you already have.

We have written the full comparison, including where each one pays off and how to build one workflow that serves all three, in GEO vs SEO vs AEO: What's the Difference?. If you are deciding where to spend effort rather than fixing a specific page, start there.

The check fetches the live page, its robots.txt and its llms.txt, then scores six signals. Each one passes or fails outright, the weights total 100, and the score is the sum of what passed. There is no partial credit and nothing is estimated.

The weights are the point. A page can fail one 14-point check and still be in good shape, but a failure on crawler access is not a deduction so much as a wall: nothing downstream matters while the engine is being turned away. The result lists the failures in weight order, so the first item is always the one worth fixing first.

Two things the score deliberately does not claim. It is a page-level readiness check, not a prediction: passing all six means an engine can quote the page, not that it will, because that also depends on competition and on how the question is asked. And it is a snapshot of one URL, so it says nothing about the rest of the site. If you want the site-wide view, or the same page watched over weeks, that is the tracking side of the product rather than this check.