AEO vs SEO, and what I changed here to be more AEO-friendly
TIL: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) optimizes for being the answer an AI cites, not just ranking in a list of blue links — and most of what makes a Next.js site AEO-friendly is stuff good SEO already wants.
Today I learned the practical difference between SEO and AEO — Answer Engine Optimization, i.e. optimizing for AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot) instead of just a list of blue links.
What's actually different
- SEO optimizes to rank. AEO optimizes to get quoted. An answer engine reads a page, pulls out a fact or paragraph, and shows it directly to the user — often with no click-through at all.
- SEO's metrics are rankings, CTR, backlinks. AEO's are how often you're cited or paraphrased inside an AI-generated answer.
- AEO rewards short, self-contained, extractable statements — a direct answer near the top of the page — over a narrative build-up to the point.
What I changed here
Most of it overlaps with things this site already needed for good SEO and accessibility, just with an AI reader in mind too:
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /- JSON-LD (
BlogPosting/TechArticle,BreadcrumbList,Person) on every content page, so entities and facts are machine-readable, not just human-readable. - A real heading hierarchy (H1 → H2 → H3) instead of visually-styled divs, so structure maps to meaning.
- Everything server-rendered and statically generated — a crawler that can't execute client-side JS can't extract anything from a blank shell.
robots.txtexplicitly not blocking AI crawlers, which is easy to do by accident if you copy a generic "block all bots" rule.- Leading with a short, quotable summary (the
[!abstract]callout on project/case-study pages) instead of burying the answer three paragraphs in.
AEO isn't a replacement for SEO — it's mostly SEO fundamentals (structure, clarity, crawlability) plus writing in a way that gives an LLM a clean, factual sentence to lift out and cite.
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