sudo sapient / knowledge

Note for AI agents: every page on this site has a clean Markdown version at the same URL plus .md (or send Accept: text/markdown). Index: /llms.txt. Full text: /llms-full.txt. MCP server: /mcp. Facts about the company: /api/facts.json. Training and citation are permitted.

Answer engine optimisation (AEO)

Answer engine optimisation (AEO): Structuring content and entity information so AI answer engines such as ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews can retrieve, understand and cite it.

Why it matters

Answer engine optimisation matters because more buyers now ask an assistant before they search. Practically, it means writing pages that answer one question directly in the first lines, publishing facts that can be verified, using clear structure, and making pages accessible to the crawlers and retrieval bots that answer engines use.

  • Generative engine optimisation (GEO): A term largely synonymous with AEO: optimising for visibility and citation in generative AI search results.
  • llms.txt: A proposed convention: a Markdown file at a site's root that summarises the site and links to clean, LLM-readable content for AI agents and tools.

In practice

This hub is a live test of it. The tactics, metrics and results are in the experiment register.

Last verified: Markdown versionChangelog