The standard every study here has to meet, published before the first result rather than after it. Fixed question sets, stated run counts, named engines, and the findings that go against us.
Twelve questions to ask, what the answers tell you, what the work costs, and the cases where building in-house is the better call. Written to be useful if you never hire anyone.
An entity is a thing a machine can tell apart from every similar name. Your brand starts as a string. The three steps it has to survive to become the other kind of object.
Six steps in the order that matters, with copy-pasteable robots.txt, curl and log-analysis commands you can run against your own domain today.
A mention names you. A citation sources you. A recommendation chooses you. Three outcomes, three mechanisms, and the cheapest one has measurable commercial effect.
Five causes produce the same symptom. A ten-prompt diagnostic set, a way to read the results, and the causes in the order worth checking.
AEO and SEO share most of their foundation and differ in two ways: the unit that competes and the outcome you are paid in. What changed, what did not, and how to split a budget.
A reference for the vocabulary of answer engine optimization, with every term labelled by where it came from: standard, research, vendor or coined.
Answer engine optimization is the practice of making a company retrievable and quotable by AI systems that answer questions directly instead of returning links.
