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Audit my page

01 / BE THE ANSWER

Answer engine optimization (AEO) software that makes your page the answer AI gives

Answer engines do not hand a searcher ten links anymore, they read back one answer. Seomake audits a page the way an engine reads it, then rewrites the parts that decide whether you are the answer: the direct response up top, the question headings, the tables, the date.

02 / The short answer

What answer engine optimization actually is

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so answer engines return it as the direct answer to a question. It covers every surface that resolves a query without a click: Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, featured snippets, voice assistants, and AI chat like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Classic SEO competes for a link on a results page. AEO competes to be the passage the engine reads back as the answer itself.

The work is mostly good on-page SEO aimed at a machine reader. An engine cannot use a sentence that only makes sense after the three paragraphs above it. It uses the sentence that answers the question on its own, under a heading that asks that question, on a page it can crawl, extract and date.

Last updated July 2026

03 / The numbers

What the answer-engine data actually says

Five figures worth knowing before you rewrite anything. They explain why ranking first, then formatting for extraction, beats keyword density on an answer surface.

Finding	Figure	What it means for your page
AI-cited pages that already rank top 10	About 92%	You cannot skip ranking and jump to being the answer. Earn the ranking first, then format for extraction.
Google searches that end without a click	About 40% (Bain)	The answer box is the destination. If you are not inside it, most searchers never reach the visit.
Overlap between ChatGPT and Perplexity citations	Only 11% of domains	Each engine picks sources its own way. Being the answer on one does not carry to the others.
Freshness of AI-cited content vs organic	25.7% fresher	Answer surfaces prefer recently touched pages. A dated, maintained page beats an undated evergreen one.
ChatGPT pages updated within 30 days	76.4% of most-cited	Recency is a citation lever, not vanity. Republishing a real update earns a re-read.

The top-10 correlation, citation-overlap and freshness figures are the published industry aggregates circulating in 2026 answer-engine research; the no-click share is Bain & Company's. Treat them as direction, not as your own numbers. The only figures we report as fact about your site are the ones the audit measures on your live HTML.

04 / Side by side

AEO vs GEO vs SEO, honestly compared

They are layers of the same job, not rivals. They share one crawl, one index and one authority model. What changes is the surface you are trying to win.

	Classic SEO	Answer engine optimization (AEO)	Generative engine optimization (GEO)
Where you win	The ten blue links	AI Overviews, snippets, voice, AI chat	Cited inside a generated answer
Unit of victory	A ranked URL	Being read back as the answer	A quoted passage with your name on it
Main engines	Google, Bing organic	Google AI Overviews, Bing, voice	ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity
What gets rewarded	Relevance, authority, links	The same, plus a self-contained answer	The same, plus extractability and freshness
Ideal structure	Keyword in title, H1, body	Question as the heading, answer in 40 to 60 words	Question heading, tables, definitions, dates
How you measure it	Search Console, rank trackers	Snippet and AI Overview share by keyword	AI referral traffic, re-running buyer prompts

GEO is the generative slice of AEO, so the two share almost every tactic. If your buyers ask AI chat tools for recommendations, read the deeper play on generative engine optimization. And because answer surfaces still pull from pages that rank, a clean on page SEO foundation comes first, not last.

The measuring row is the one people ask about most. There is no Search Console for AI answers, so a whole category of dedicated tools now samples the engines for you. The AI visibility tracker comparison covers what each one measures and what it costs, plus the manual method that gets you most of the way for nothing.

05 / What the audit checks

The six things that decide whether you become the answer

Seomake reads your live HTML the way an answer engine does, flags each of these, and writes the corrected version rather than leaving you a score.

A direct answer up top

The first 40 to 60 words under each heading have to answer the question on their own, with no dependency on the paragraph above. That is the passage an engine reads back.

Questions as headings

Real questions, phrased the way people type and speak them, used verbatim as H2s. An engine matching a query to a passage matches the heading first.

Extractable structure

Tables, definition lists and short labelled rows survive extraction into an answer box. A wall of prose does not, however good the prose is.

An honest, visible date

A last-updated line the page actually earns. Recency is one of the strongest signals on every answer surface, and the strongest of all on ChatGPT.

Crawlability for AI agents

GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended have to be allowed in robots.txt. Blocking them is the quiet way to lose every answer at once.

Schema that names the entity

Organization, Article and FAQ markup so the engine knows who is answering and attributes it to you by name, not to whoever paraphrased you second.

06 / The loop

From skipped page to the answer, in four steps

STEP 1
Audit the page as an engine reads it

Paste the URL and the keyword. Seomake fetches the live page and scores what an answer extractor would actually find on it.
STEP 2
Get the rewrite, not the grade

The direct-answer block, the question headings, the table to add and the schema to ship, written out and ready to approve.
STEP 3
Publish and date it

Ship the fix with an honest last-updated line. Recrawls are what put the new answer in front of the engines.
STEP 4
Re-run the buyer questions

Ask each engine the questions your buyers ask, on a schedule, and watch whether your page becomes the answer they read back.

It is the same loop as the rest of the product, pointed at answer surfaces. The SEO audit tool finds the gaps, AI content writes the answer, and rank tracking tells you whether it moved.

07 / Asked and answered

Answer engine optimization, question by question

What is answer engine optimization?

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so answer engines return it as the direct answer to a question. It covers Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, featured snippets, voice assistants and AI chat like ChatGPT and Perplexity. The goal is not a blue link, it is being the sentence the engine reads back.

How does answer engine optimization work?

It works by answering the question directly, in the first 40 to 60 words under a heading that repeats the question, on a page an engine can crawl and date. Add tables, definitions and schema so the answer is easy to extract and attribute. Answer engines pull the passage that stands on its own, so the work is on-page SEO aimed at a machine reader.

Is answer engine optimization different from traditional SEO?

It builds on SEO rather than replacing it. About 92% of pages cited in AI answers already rank in the top 10, so you cannot skip ranking and jump to being the answer. What AEO adds is a format layer: self-contained answers, question headings, extractable tables and honest dates on top of the authority and relevance SEO already earns.

What is the difference between AEO and GEO?

AEO is the wider umbrella and GEO is the generative subset of it. Answer engine optimization covers every answer surface, including Google AI Overviews, featured snippets and voice. Generative engine optimization focuses on being cited inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity answers. Optimize for both with the same self-contained, well-structured content.

How do I do answer engine optimization?

Pick the question a buyer actually types, put it verbatim in a heading, and answer it in the first two sentences with no setup. Back the claim with a table or a figure, keep AI crawlers allowed in robots.txt, add Article and FAQ schema, and stamp an honest last-updated date. Then re-run the question on each engine to see whether you appear.

What are the best answer engine optimization tools?

The useful ones audit a live page the way an engine reads it and hand back the corrected passage, not a score. Seomake fetches your URL, checks the direct-answer block, the question headings, the tables and the schema, writes the fixes, and tracks whether rankings and AI citations move. General rank trackers and content graders miss the extractability layer that decides AEO.

Can you track whether an answer engine cites your site?

Yes, though not in Search Console. Citations surface as brand mentions inside AI answers plus referral traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com. Watch those referrers in analytics, track your featured-snippet and AI Overview appearances by keyword, and re-run the same buyer questions on each engine on a schedule to catch changes.

Want to see the tactic that carries the most weight in an AI answer? The blog breaks down how answer engines pick which sources to cite.

08 / Run it

Find out whether an answer engine would read your page back

Paste one URL and the keyword it should own. Seomake reads the live page, scores how extractable the answer is, and writes the answer block, the question headings and the schema it is missing. No account, no card.

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