AEO content writing: how to write pages AI assistants can quote

What AEO content writing means

AEO content writing is writing a page so an AI assistant can quote it correctly. AEO stands for answer engine optimisation, and an answer engine is any tool that replies with an answer rather than a list of links, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or a Google AI Overview.

An assistant that searches the web reads several pages, picks passages from them, and writes one answer. Your page wins when a passage from it ends up in that answer with your name or your link attached. So the unit you are writing for is not the page. It is the passage: a few sentences that make sense on their own when lifted out.

That changes the habits a writer brings from ordinary search. A long build-up before the point, a clever heading that does not say what follows, and a figure with no source are all fine for a human skimming. They are weak material for a machine that has to pick one passage and trust it. If you want to know how answers like these can be counted, our method page explains one way.

What the research says helps

The best evidence comes from one benchmark, and it says checkable additions beat keyword tricks. The study is GEO: Generative Engine Optimization by Aggarwal and others, accepted at KDD 2024.

Read these with care. The GEO paper measured how much of a source made it into an answer, inside a benchmark the authors built, and it says the effect of each method varies by subject. The Lost in the Middle paper is about how models read a long input, not about web pages as such. Neither tells you exactly what ChatGPT or Gemini does today. Together they point the same way: put the answer where it is easy to find, and give the reader something to check.

Google's guidance agrees with the spirit, if not the method. Its page on AI features says there are "no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary", and points back to its advice on people-first content.

Answer first, under every heading

Each section should open with its answer in one or two sentences. Everything after that is support: the reason, the detail, the exception.

The easiest way to check this is to read only the first sentence after each heading. If those sentences, in order, give a reader the whole answer, the page is quotable. If they are scene-setting, the answer is buried, and an assistant has to dig for it or pick someone else.

Notice two habits in the right column. Each sentence names the thing it is about, because a passage taken out of the page cannot borrow its subject from the previous paragraph. And each one says something that could be wrong, which is exactly what makes it worth quoting.

Headings that say what follows

A heading is a promise about the passage under it, so write it as the question or the answer, not as a teaser. "How much does Example Tool cost?" tells a reader and a machine what comes next. "The money question" does not.

Questions as headings work well where buyers ask questions in the same words. Plain statements work well where the section gives a verdict, such as "Example Tool has no Salesforce connection". Either way, the heading and the first sentence together should make sense if they were the only two lines anyone read.

Make every claim something a reader can check

A figure with a source is quotable, and a figure without one is a risk. This is where the GEO results and plain honesty agree.

• Link every figure to its source in the same sentence. If the figure is yours, say how you measured it and when.
• Give the denominator. "Used by 40 teams" means little. "40 of the 120 teams we asked" means something.
• Quote named people word for word, with their role. A quotation from a named source is one of the edits the GEO paper found helped most.
• Date anything that changes, such as prices, limits and feature lists. Write "as of" and the date.
• Say where you are weaker. A page that admits a limit is more believable, and an assistant answering a comparison question needs that sentence.

Google's guidance on helpful, people-first content asks the same of a page in its own words. Among its questions: "Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?" and, for content drawing on other sources, whether it avoids "simply copying or rewriting those sources". A page that restates what ten other pages say gives an assistant no reason to cite it over them.

Write the sentence you would want an assistant to repeat about you, then make sure it is true, sourced and dated.

Use the shapes assistants can lift: tables, lists and short definitions

Structure is a writing choice, not decoration. A table, a numbered list or a one-sentence definition is easier to lift whole than the same facts spread across a paragraph.

Write tables in HTML text, not as images. An image of a table is invisible to a reader using a screen reader and to most machines reading the page. Give each table a caption that says what the rows are and what any figure is a share of. A caption travels with the table when it is lifted out.

Length and depth

No source we read sets a word count for a quotable page. Google asks whether content provides "a substantial, complete, or comprehensive description of the topic", which is a test of coverage rather than length.

In practice, a page that answers one question completely is easier to quote than a page that touches ten questions lightly. If a page has grown to cover several questions, consider splitting it, so each one has a clear answer near the top.

A checklist for every page

Run this list before you publish. It takes a few minutes and catches most of what makes a page hard to quote.

1. Write down the one question the page answers, in the words a buyer would type or say.
2. Put that question, or something close, in the title and the first heading.
3. Read only the first sentence under each heading. Together they should answer the question.
4. Check that every sentence names its subject, so it still makes sense on its own.
5. Link every figure to its source, and give its denominator and date.
6. Turn every comparison into a table with a caption.
7. Add a short set of questions and answers at the end, using the questions people actually ask.
8. Say who wrote the page and when, and say if AI tools were used to write it.
9. Remove sentences that could be about any company. If a competitor could publish the same line, it says nothing.

The eighth step comes from Google's own questions. Its people-first guidance asks whether it is "self-evident to your visitors who authored your content", and whether the use of automation, including AI generation, is clear to visitors.

What writing cannot fix

A well-written page still loses if an assistant cannot read it or has no reason to trust you. Writing is one of three things that have to be true, and it is the one you control most.

• Access. If your robots.txt or a firewall turns an assistant's crawler away, it cannot read the page. Check this first, because it makes every other step pointless. Our guide to robots.txt for AI crawlers lists the names to allow.
• Other sites. An assistant that searches the web can draw on what review sites, lists and forums say about you. Your own page cannot stand in for those.
• The question itself. If nobody asks the question your page answers, it will not be quoted, however well it is written.

Agentcites works on the second half of this. It asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and DeepSeek the questions your buyers ask, records who is named and which pages are cited, and for a question you lost to a page, it plans and drafts a page aimed at that one question. The draft links only to your own pages and to pages the assistants cited, and it leaves a labelled blank rather than invent a number about your business. You publish it yourself. The drafts page shows what a draft contains, and the pricing page gives the plan and its limits.