CrawlProof

2026-05-01

What is AEO, and why it isn't SEO

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of making your content findable and citable by LLM-powered answer engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews. The constraints overlap with SEO — clean HTML, sitemap, schema — but they diverge in the details. AEO cares about JS-rendering (LLMs see less than headless browsers), about explicit AI-bot rules in robots.txt, and about new files like llms.txt and skill.md.