What is answer engine optimization (AEO), and how do you get cited by AI assistants?

How AI assistants choose what to quote

When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity a question that needs current or specific information, the assistant searches the web, reads a handful of pages and writes an answer from them, often with links to its sources. Google’s AI Overviews do the same with Google’s own index.

That gives you two jobs. First, your page has to be among the ones the assistant finds, which is ordinary SEO. Second, once it’s found, it has to be the easiest one to quote: clear, specific and trustworthy. That second job is what AEO adds.

What makes a page easy to quote

The answer comes first

Put the direct answer in the first one or two sentences after the heading, then explain. An assistant looking for “how long does a HubSpot migration take” can use “Four to eight weeks for a typical marketing site” straight away. It can’t easily use three paragraphs of background that get to the point at the end.

Headings are the questions people ask

“How much does it cost?” works better as a heading than “Pricing philosophy”. Use the words your buyers use. Your sales team’s inbox and call notes are the best source of these questions.

Facts are specific

Numbers, prices, timeframes, names and steps get quoted. Vague claims such as “industry-leading solutions” don’t, because there’s nothing in them to quote.

Someone stands behind it

Named authors, dates, sources for statistics and real examples from your own work are all signals that the page is reliable, for readers and for the systems that choose sources.

The technical side

• Let the crawlers in. Check that your robots.txt doesn’t block the search crawlers that AI assistants use, such as OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot, as well as Googlebot and Bingbot. Blocking training crawlers is a separate decision and doesn’t have to affect search.
• Serve the content as HTML. Many AI crawlers don’t run JavaScript. If your text only appears after a script loads it, they may see an empty page.
• Add structured data. Schema markup tells machines what a page is about: your organization, a service, an article, an FAQ. See schema markup in HubSpot.
• Be in Bing, too. Several assistants draw on Bing’s index, so submit your sitemap in Bing Webmaster Tools as well as Google Search Console.
• Keep it fast. Slow pages get crawled less, and they lose readers as well.

Beyond your own site

Assistants don’t only read your website. They also weigh what others say about you: directory profiles, reviews, partner listings, articles that mention you, and forums. Make sure your company name, what you do and where you are are described the same way everywhere. A review profile or a client’s case study that names you can do as much as a new page.

A simple routine to start with

1. List the ten questions your buyers ask most before they buy.
2. Ask each one in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google, and note who gets cited.
3. Give every question a page or a section on your site, with the question as the heading and the answer in the first two sentences.
4. Add the structured data that fits, and test the pages in Google’s Rich Results Test.
5. Ask the same questions again every month and keep a log of the answers.

On HubSpot? We built our AEO First theme for exactly this: answer-first modules and structured data in every module, so each page is ready to be quoted without extra work.