AEO: Getting Started | Hedge-Ops Software

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Last year I began hearing people talk about AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, and how important it is to get AI to recommend your product or services as people are going to AI for answers for more of the questions they used to type into Google Search. I went to AI anonymously and tried to get it to recommend my product to me when I asked it specific questions that my product provides answers for. I wasn't too surprised when it didn't know anything about my product or what it did or what problems it solved, but I was honestly pretty discouraged.

I felt like it was impossible for a small business to ever get recommended on AI platforms when the behemoth companies already own SEO success and have full-time, dedicated staff working on AEO solutions. I felt overwhelmed. -me

Then I listened to Ethan Smith's AEO playbook on Lenny's Podcast, and hope was sparked. I took what I learned and built a game plan from there, one that even exceeded his playbook. I'm going to walk you through my ongoing practice of AEO and what changes I've seen over the last six months.

I'll show you what we changed on hedge-ops.com and people-work.io, the types of prompts I used to make the changes, and where AEO continues to show me where I have a lack of clarity in my business messaging, giving me opportunities for improvement.

Intro to AEO - What is AEO and why does it matter?

AEO = SEO + citation optimization<br>You can think of AEO as SEO for AI, but, more specifically, it's SEO plus citation optimization. SEO will rank your relevance, but AEO will determine whether or not AI should cite you as a resource for a particular topic.

AEO is not a one and done exercise but an ongoing practice. I will show you certain things that you can put in place and forget about it, but at the heart of AEO is building trust and credibility, which takes time and consistency.

The four levers small businesses can pull for good AEO

Structured data - the hidden labels AI reads

Semantic HTML - making pages that AI can extract and quote

llms.txt - publishing for AI directly

Off-site presence - building credibility out in the wild

Lever 1: Structured data (the hidden labels AI reads)

If you're not technical and don't know what this is, fear not. It's not as complicated as it sounds. Let me show you.

What structured data is, in plain English

Our websites have two different views. There's one that we can see and one that the machines can see. What we can see is a very decorated and lovely view designed for human eyes.

What the machines can see is basically all of the metadata that a machine needs to make a determination on your website.

There is JSON code embedded in every page that gives AI the stripped down version of what it needs to know. On the left you can see the JSON code, and on the right you can see a more human-readable version of the same thing.

To see this for your own website, go to https://validator.schema.org/ and enter in your URL. Before I worked on my AEO, this view was abysmal. It was missing data, had outdated descriptions, and overall lacking.

The @graph pattern (and why a single block beats multiple)

There are two ways you can hand over this data from above to an AI: as separate index cards or one connected map. Most sites do it the first way:

script type="application/ld+json"><br>{ "@type": "Organization", "name": "Hedge-Ops Software" }<br>script>script type="application/ld+json"><br>{ "@type": "WebPage", "name": "Our services" }<br>script>script type="application/ld+json"><br>{ "@type": "Article", "headline": "Why people work matters" }<br>script><br>These blocks don't reference each other, so AI has to guess if and how they're related.

On the other hand, if an AI lands on this very blog post that you're reading, it will know that:

It was written by Annie Hedgpeth.

She is the co-founder of Hedge-Ops Software.

They created People Work.

There's more on LinkedIn and all of these other references on the connected map.

It's able to verify my credibility this way because it "asked around", just like you would if you were verifying a person's credibility.

We collapse everything into one block with one @graph array simply so that it's easier to reason about the site. Every page on my sites emits exactly one block in containing a single @graph array. Every entity gets a unique label (or @id), and then entities point at each other using those labels.

Entity@id<br>Your companyhttps://yoursite.com/#organization<br>Your website itselfhttps://yoursite.com/#website<br>A founder or personhttps://yoursite.com/#person-jane-doe<br>A specific pagehttps://yoursite.com/some-page/#webpage<br>A blog posthttps://yoursite.com/posts/the-slug/#blogposting<br>A service offeringhttps://yoursite.com/#consulting

Your AI or your developer will generate this template (but with your info) just once, and then every page renders its own. (See the prompts below.)

script...