Answer engine optimisation, sometimes generative engine optimisation, is the practice of trying to be named when an assistant answers a buyer's question. The goal is real. Most of the tactics being sold for it are extrapolations from search practice, presented with a certainty that nothing available to us supports.
The honest split is between what can be checked and what cannot. Whether you are named, by which engine, alongside whom, citing what: checkable, weekly, and storable. Why the engine chose you, and whether a specific change will move it: not checkable by anybody outside the vendor.
What is defensible today
- Measure before you adviseA weekly question set with stored answers gives you a baseline and its noise. Without one, every claim about improvement is unfalsifiable.
- Follow the citationsThe sources answers actually lean on are observable. Being described accurately in the places engines read is ordinary work with a visible input.
- Be legible about what you sellClear product pages, honest comparisons, specifics rather than adjectives. This is good practice regardless, and it is what the engines are reading when they describe you.
- Watch the rivals that appearThe brands engines keep naming beside you are a market map somebody else assembled, and it is frequently not the map you would have drawn.
What we will not tell you
We will not give you a ranking mechanic for these systems, a schema type that guarantees a mention, or a promise that a change will move a percentage. Nobody outside those vendors can support those claims, and a measurement product that also sells the causal story has an obvious conflict about which numbers it reports.
What we will do is store every answer, so that when something does move, you can read what changed in the prose rather than guessing at what changed in a model.
Is AEO different from SEO?
The measurement is genuinely different: prose mentions rather than ranked links, with no impressions and no clicks behind them. Much of the underlying work overlaps, which is why treating it as an entirely separate discipline mostly sells retainers.
Does llms.txt help?
There is no evidence it does anything for Google Search, and our own issue catalog records that. Adding a file is cheap; being told it is a ranking factor is not.
How long before a change shows up?
Unknown, and anyone giving you a confident number is guessing. What you can do is keep asking the same questions weekly and watch, which is why the question set is fixed and the answers are kept.
Try it on your own site, free
No card, and the free tier does not expire — the first verdict takes about six weeks to arrive.