AEO Best Practices: 5 Ways to Improve Your Brand’s AI Visibility

If you feel like your organic traffic is slipping, even though you are still doing “all the right things” for SEO, you're not imagining it.

Search behavior has changed.

Buyers are no longer just typing queries into Google and clicking through a list of blue links. More and more, they are going straight to AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. They ask a question and expect a clear, confident answer. No scrolling. No hunting. No ten tabs open at once.

Strategist Patrick Moorhead calls this shift the Answer Economy in his book AnswerRank, a world where the real competition is not just for search rankings, but for a place inside the AI-generated answer itself.

In this world, traditional SEO is still important, but it is not enough.

The bigger question becomes:

When someone asks an AI assistant about our space, does our brand show up in the answer?

To earn that presence, you need a clear Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) strategy (sometimes called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), Large Language Model Optimization (LLMO) or AI search optimization), with practical steps that help AI systems understand what you do, why you are credible, and when you are the right recommendation.

Here at IMPACT, we teach our clients to create written content using the Endless Customers System™, a framework built on trust, transparency, and teaching. Even with that foundation in place, your content still needs to follow specific best practices to be easily understood and recommended by AI language models.

The good news: you don't have to change your entire content marketing strategy or start from scratch.

Below are five practical, achievable best practices you can apply to your existing content to improve your visibility inside AI-generated answers.

1. Make Your Content Easy for AI to Read and Summarize

Just like your content needs to make sense when a human reads it, it also needs to make sense for AI models.

Large language models are constantly scanning for:

• Clear questions and clear answers
• Logical headings and structure
• Obvious “this is the takeaway” moments

When your content is vague, buried in story, or poorly structured, models are forced to guess. And usually, they will pick a different source that is easier to summarize.

How to do this:

• Audit for direct answers.
  Take your highest-value pages and ask, “If someone asked an AI assistant this question, would this page give a clear, one-paragraph answer near the top?” If not, rewrite it so it does.

• Turn headings into buyer questions.
  Rewrite your H1s and H2s so they sound like the questions your buyers would actually type or ask an AI assistant.

• Lead with the answer.
  Open your articles and key sections with the direct answer, then add context, examples, and detail. This mirrors how AI assistants respond and makes your content easier to quote.

• Break long pages into modules.
  Use clear sections with their own subheadings and short summaries. Think of each section as something that could be cited on its own, without needing the whole page for context.

Use AI-Friendly Formats and Structured Data

Traditional SEO has always valued structure. AEO simply raises the stakes.

Language models lean on schema and other structured elements to quickly understand what a page is about and how to reuse it in answers.

Schema is a small layer of code on your page that labels key pieces of content, so search engines and AI tools can instantly tell what they are looking at and when to recommend it.

How to do this:

• Add schema to critical pages.
  Start by adding schema to your most important pages, like your core articles, product and service pages, process explainers, and FAQs. Formats such as `Article`, `FAQPage`, `Product`, and `HowTo` tell search engines and AI tools exactly what kind of content they are looking at, so they know when to surface it and which parts to quote in an answer.

• Lean into FAQs.
  Take the questions your buyers actually ask and build an FAQ section at the bottom of key pages. This is super helpful for having your content show up in AI Overviews. Mark it up with FAQ schema so AI tools and search engines can ingest it quickly.

• Use tables and structured blocks.
  When you compare options, list features, or show pricing ranges, put that information in a table or clearly structured bullet list. Models love organized information they can easily reuse.

• Make multimedia machine-readable.
  For videos and podcasts:

  • Add transcripts

• • Write short semantic summaries

• • Include chapters or time-stamped sections

  • The more clearly you describe what is happening, the easier it is for AI to pull that content into answers.

3. Build Trust with Radical Transparency

AI assistants are trained to surface answers that are helpful, honest, and balanced. If your brand consistently avoids the hard questions, the models will find those answers somewhere else, often from your competitors.

This is where The Big 5 topics come into play. In the Endless Customers System™, we lean heavily on these five types of content because they address the questions buyers are already asking and the questions AI assistants are more likely to feature in answers:

1. Cost & Price
2. Problems
3. Versus & Comparisons
4. Reviews
5. Best in Class

When you openly address these questions, you send a strong signal of credibility to both buyers and AI systems.

How to do this:

• Audit your Big 5 coverage.
  Look at Cost & Price, Problems, Versus & Comparisons, Reviews, and Best in Class, then note where your content is thin or missing entirely.

• Add clear fit and no-fit language to core pages.
  Update your main service pages so they spell out who gets the best results with you and who should probably look elsewhere.

• Keep high-value content fresh.
  Revisit your best-performing Big 5 articles a few times a year to add new examples, current numbers, and a recent “last updated” date.

Grow Authority Beyond Your Own Website

With AEO, your authority comes from more than just your own website. AI models look across the broader web to see:

• Who talks about you
• Where you are cited
• How consistently your expertise shows up in different places

Think of this as distributed authority.

How to do this:

• Show up where your buyers hang out.
  Participate in:

  1. Industry forums

  2. LinkedIn conversations

  3. Reddit, Quora, or other niche communities

• Focus on teaching, answering like someone who wants to help. Link back to resources only when it truly helps the original poster.

• Invest in true earned media.
  Seek out opportunities to be:

  1. Interviewed on podcasts

  2. Quoted in articles

  3. Featured in industry reports

• AI systems weigh independent coverage more heavily than paid placements or self-published claims.

• Highlight your subject matter experts.
  Create robust author pages that include:

  1. Bio and role

  2. Experience and education

  3. Links to talks, interviews, and social profiles

  This helps AI systems connect your content to real, credible humans.

5. Treat Content as Infrastructure, Not Just “Posts”

Most companies still treat content as something you publish, promote, and then move on from.

In an AI-driven world, your content is more like infrastructure.

It is the underlying system of knowledge that AI tools tap into when they need to explain your category, compare options, or recommend vendors.

Your goal is to quietly become the “source of truth” for your space.

How to do this:

• Keep it simple.
  Instead of trying to be the loudest voice, focus on being the clearest, most structurally sound one. When your content is easy to trust and reuse, AI systems will amplify it for you.

• Build a true knowledge hub.
  Go beyond a chronological blog and build a Learning Center. Create:

  1. Pillar pages that define key concepts

  2. Cluster content that dives deeper into subtopics

  3. Clear internal links that connect everything together

  
  

  Think of it as building an encyclopedia for your industry.

• Prioritize usefulness over promotion.
  Every major piece of content should answer a question, explain a concept, or guide a decision. If a section exists only to talk about you, trim it back or tie it back to buyer value.

• Use AI as a collaborator, not a substitute.
  AI tools are great for:

  • Brainstorming outlines

  • Helping with research

  • Tightening language

  But the point of view, examples, and real-world nuance need to come from your team. That's what makes your content worth citing.

Frequently Asked Questions Around AEO

1. What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO, in simple terms)?

Answer Engine Optimization (sometimes called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Large Language Model Optimization (LLMO), or AI search optimization) is the practice of shaping your content so AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini can easily understand it, trust it, and reuse it in their answers. It focuses on clear structure, transparent teaching, and strong authority signals across the web. In simple terms, AEO helps AI assistants see you as a helpful expert when buyers ask questions about your space.

2. Do I still need to care about SEO if buyers are using AI assistants?

Yes, traditional SEO still matters a great deal. The pages that show up in search results are often the same pages AI assistants pull from when they build answers. Strong technical SEO, fast performance, and helpful content give you a better chance to rank in search and to be included in AI responses. AEO builds on top of that foundation by making your content even easier for language models to read and recommend.

3. How do I know if AI assistants are already recommending my brand?

The simplest way is to ask the tools directly. Take a few real questions your buyers would ask, then plug them into AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Gemini and see whether your brand or content appears in the answer or citations (just make sure to use an incognito account, because the tool you've been using is trained on your biased, previous data). You can also ask new leads how they found you and listen for AI driven paths, such as someone saying they started with a question inside one of these tools. Over time, this gives you a sense of how often AI is already bringing you into the conversation.

The Opportunity in Front of You

AI answer experiences are already part of how buyers research and make decisions today.

When someone asks an AI assistant a buying question in your space, that answer is shaping their understanding long before they ever visit a website or talk to a salesperson. If your brand is missing from that response, you are invisible at the exact moment when decisions are being formed.

You do not control the models. But you do control the clarity, transparency, and authority of the content you publish.

That is what effective AEO is really about:
Not just being found, but being trusted enough to be part of the answer.

If you want to become the most known, trusted, and recommended brand in your market, consider the Endless Customers Coaching Program. This program gives your team the tools, training, and guidance to build an in-house marketing engine, align leadership, unify sales and marketing, and generate more qualified opportunities.