A new acronym is doing the rounds. Answer engine optimisation, AEO, sometimes generative engine optimisation instead. The pitch is that search has changed, your SEO is obsolete, and you need a new discipline and probably a new vendor.
Some of that is true. Most of it is the same work with a different name. Here is where the line actually falls, based on what we found checking 152 B2B software sites rather than on what sounds urgent.
What genuinely changed
Three things, and they are real.
The click is often optional. A buyer asking an assistant a question may get a useful answer, and a citation, and never visit you. Your name appearing in the answer is now a distinct outcome from a visit, and your analytics will not show it.
Passages compete, not pages. A model assembling an answer pulls the paragraph that addresses the question. The rest of the page is context it may never use. Whether your page ranks matters less than whether any single passage on it is liftable.
The machine reading you may not run JavaScript. Search crawlers got good at rendering pages. Many of the agents now fetching your site on a user's behalf do not bother, or do so on a budget.
What did not change
Almost everything else, and this is the part the new-discipline pitch skips.
A model answering a question still needs to find your page, still needs to be able to read it, and still needs a reason to trust it over the alternative. Those are the three jobs SEO has always had. Crawlability, clarity and credibility did not get replaced. They got a second audience.
The people selling AEO as a separate discipline are often selling the same technical audit with a new cover.
The scare that does not hold up
The standard opening is that AI crawlers cannot reach your site. We checked. Across 166 B2B software domains, one blocked an answer engine in robots.txt. Ninety-six percent scored perfectly on crawler access.
We validated the check against news and media sites, where 88% block at least one answer engine, so the test works. Publishers block. B2B software companies, almost universally, do not.
If a scan hands you "good news, you are not blocking GPTBot" as its headline finding, it has told you something true of nearly everybody.
What actually separated sites
Of 152 reachable sites, 86% failed at least one of four basic checks. The two that mattered:
32% had no structured data describing the business. Half had none at all. The other half emitted only what their CMS plugin produces automatically: this is a web page, it belongs to a website, here is a breadcrumb. All true, none of it saying what the company does or sells.
9% sent under 250 words before JavaScript ran. In a browser those sites look finished. To something that does not execute scripts, they are close to empty.
Neither of those is a new discipline. Both are ordinary technical hygiene that a second audience made expensive again.
The one genuinely new habit
If there is a single writing change worth making, it is this: answer the question directly, under the heading that asks it, in the first two sentences.
Not a preamble about how important the topic is. Not three paragraphs of context before the answer. If someone asks an assistant "what does a design subscription cost", the passage that gets quoted is the one that says what it costs, immediately, in a section headed with that question.
This is good writing anyway. It just used to be optional, because a human skimming would scroll to find the answer. A model extracting a passage will not.
The related habit: make each section able to stand alone. A paragraph that opens "as we discussed above" cannot be quoted, because the thing it refers to will not travel with it.
What we would actually do, in order
- Make your structured data describe your business. Organization, Product or SoftwareApplication, FAQPage. Not just the furniture your plugin emits.
- Get your content into the server HTML. If
curlon your homepage returns almost nothing, that is what the machines read. - Answer questions in the first two sentences under their headings.
- Write the pages buyers actually ask about: pricing, comparisons, integrations, what you do not do.
- Check robots.txt once, spend ten seconds on it, and move on unless you are the 1%.
Notice that four of the five are things a competent SEO would have told you in 2019. That is the honest summary of AEO: a small number of new habits sitting on top of work that was always worth doing.
How to tell a real vendor from a rebranded one
Ask what they will measure, and whether they will promise citations. Nobody can promise placement in an AI answer, because nobody controls the engines and none of them publish their ranking logic. A vendor willing to guarantee it is telling you something about their honesty, not their method.
Then ask what they would fix first on your site. If the answer is llms.txt, be careful. It is cheap and harmless and we would publish one, but no major engine has committed to reading it, and 78% of the sites we checked do not have one.
See where you stand
We built the four checks into a free tool. Enter your URL and it runs them on screen in about two seconds, with the evidence for each so you can confirm it rather than trust us. Run it on your site, or read the full 152-site findings.
