Cited, not just crawled

Answer Engine Optimization is an unlovely name for a simple idea: write so a machine can quote you without lying. AI Overviews, voice, and chat products do not want your homepage. They want a passage — a self-contained claim with a name and a source.

Most marketing sites fail this test on contact. The first two sentences are a mission statement. The claim, if it exists, is three scrolls down, hedged, and unattributed. A model looking for a lift-able answer will take the competitor who led with the number.

AEO is not schema as a superstition. Markup helps a parser; it does not invent expertise. The sequence is: a true answer, in the language of the question, with the brand in the sentence, and a primary source beside it. Then markup. Then FAQs that are actually asked.

Measure it the way a journalist would. For a panel of questions you ought to own, are you the named source? If not, the page is not finished. Crawl is table stakes. Citation is the product.