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AEO

The AEO Optimisation Guide

How to structure your content so AI models cite your pages instead of your competitors'.

AI Engine Optimisation rewards different patterns from classical SEO. This is the framework Kritano uses internally and audits against in our AEO scan.

For: Content marketers, SEO leads, product marketers, founders

What is inside

AI engines reward structure, citability, and demonstrable expertise. The patterns are different from classical SEO. This is the framework that works in 2025.

The fundamental shift

SEO answer = your link in the results
AEO answer = your sentence in the response, with your URL as the citation

The five pillars

  • Content frontloading. AI models index and quote the first 100-200 words of a page more heavily than the rest. If your answer lives in paragraph 6, you are not being quoted.
  • Citation-friendly structure. Definitive single-sentence facts. Numbered lists. Comparison tables. Stats with inline sources.
  • Structured data. Article, FAQPage, HowTo, Organization, Person schema with verified sameAs links.
  • Authority signals. Named authors with public footprints. Confident, factual writing. Citations from .gov, .edu, or industry sources.
  • Crawler accessibility. Inference-time bots (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot) must be allowed in robots.txt.

A sample of the audit

  • The page's main question is answered in the first 100 words.
  • The first sentence does not start with "In this post" or similar meta-framing.
  • Article JSON-LD with named author and dates.
  • Author block links via sameAs to a verifiable profile.
  • robots.txt does not block OAI-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot.

Get the full 60-point audit and the six-week implementation programme below.

A 13-page guide to getting cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. Covers the five pillars Kritano scores against (frontloading, citability, structure, authority, crawler accessibility), a 60-point AEO audit framework, the most common AEO mistakes, and a six-week implementation programme that produces measurable citation uplift within 90 days.