How to Improve AEO: 10 Steps to Get Cited by AI Answer Engines
How do you improve AEO?
You improve AEO by making every important page trivially easy for an AI engine to parse, trust, and quote — clear question-and-answer structure, answer-focused schema, visible authorship, semantic HTML, and a curated llms.txt. The ten steps below come straight from the AEO / Answer Engine category of the AEO Presence scorecard (26% of the overall score), ordered the way the scorecard prioritizes them.
Step 1: Add question-style headings
Rewrite key H2s as the questions users actually ask — 'What is X?', 'How much does Y cost?'. Answer engines match questions to questions.
Step 2: Answer immediately below each question
Put a direct, self-contained answer in the first sentence under every question heading. Bold it. If the paragraph can't be quoted standalone, rewrite it.
Step 3: Add a TL;DR or key-takeaways block
Place a 3-6 bullet summary near the top of every substantial page. It's a pre-packaged extract for engines and an instant payoff for readers.
Step 4: Ship FAQPage and HowTo schema
Add JSON-LD that mirrors your visible Q&A and step-by-step content. These types map directly onto how answer engines structure responses.
Step 5: Show your author and your dates
Every page gets a visible byline and a machine-readable date (<time datetime> or article:published_time). E-E-A-T signals decide whether engines trust you enough to cite you.
Step 6: Use semantic HTML landmarks
Wrap content in <main> and <article>, navigation in <nav>. Landmarks tell machines which text is the actual content worth extracting versus chrome.
Step 7: Publish llms.txt
Add a plain-text llms.txt at your site root: a curated, annotated map of your most important pages for AI crawlers.
Step 8: Fix your heading hierarchy
Keep levels sequential (no H2 → H4 jumps) and exactly one H1 per page. A logical outline is what the parser reconstructs your page from.
Step 9: Improve readability
Target a Flesch Reading Ease that a general audience can handle. Short sentences and plain words survive extraction; jargon-dense walls of text don't.
Step 10: Re-audit after every change
Run a scorecard scan, fix the worst problem, and re-run. Deterministic scoring means you can watch the number move — and prove the work paid off.
What should you do first?
Don't guess — measure. Run your site through the 25-point AEO checklist (or book a AEO Presence demo scan) and fix whatever scores worst. Repeated issues across pages usually point to templates or shared components, where one fix moves every page at once.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to see AEO results?
Structural fixes (schema, headings, TL;DR blocks) are picked up as soon as engines re-crawl — often days. Trust signals compound more slowly. Re-audit weekly and sample AI citations monthly.
What's the single highest-impact AEO fix?
For most sites: question-style headings with a direct answer in the first sentence underneath, backed by matching FAQPage schema. It attacks retrieval, parsing, and selection all at once.
Can I do AEO without touching my CMS templates?
Partially — page-level content fixes work anywhere. But repeated issues across pages (missing landmarks, absent schema, no dates) usually live in templates, so template access is where site-wide scores move.