AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, is getting your site used as a source when people ask AI tools a question, the way SEO is getting found in traditional search.

In your HERO Website, the AEO Site Score is derived from an analysis of the content and structure of your website in relation to what AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot are looking for.

Consider the following oversimplified objective of AI in presenting your site as an answer to the question asked of their answer engine:

• Does your site have this question and the answer to it, in a format that's easy to discern and digest?
• Is your site considered a reliable source for this answer?

To summarize, the easiest way to give the answer engine what it wants is:

• Structure your site in such a way that it can be easily indexed and digested. Your HERO Website does this at the fundamental level.
• Structure questions and answers that provide valuable information to real-life questions that people ask. Your FAQ pages do this, but you enter the content based on your experience.
• Ensure your site is considered reliable, which is based on longevity, traffic, traditional SEO elements, and a number of other soft items. Your HERO Website's SEO Site Analysis helps you through these things. Our Custom SEO Service takes it from armchair quarterback quality to on-the-field NFL grade performance.

If your website has a perfect score of 100, that indicates that everything in the content and structure of your website is finely tuned. However, that alone does not mean you have good functional AEO. By way of analogy, you may have a perfect house in perfect condition at a perfect price, but because it's not marketed, nobody rents it. Read on for more on how this applies to AEO.

If your score is less than 100, the SEO Site Analysis function provides details on what needs fixing up in the Answer Content section. The analysis is based on your FAQ (Q&A) pages, which are structured as questions and answers ideal for inclusion by answer engines. However, it does not factor in the narrative content of other pages of your site, which are also important for AI. Each AI engine has its own secret algorithm for how that information is ingested and reported. However, it is well known that if you answer questions in your site, the AI ranks that as being highly important as it constructs its responses to user questions.

Your AEO Site Score is your AEO Quotient adjusted by your SEO Site Score. The AEO Quotient is the raw score of your questions and answers; the AEO Site Score factors in SEO. If your website does not have good SEO, it's unlikely that the AI will regard you as the trusted source for answers, so your AEO Site Score will go down, even if your AEO Quotient is high.

However, perfect AEO/SEO content and structure alone are not enough to get you to the top of the list in AI engines. There are tons of external factors, like the sites that link to you and the context in which they do it, when your website is cited by others, how many reviews positively mention you, and much more. Also included are factors like analyzing what searchers are asking for, what details they are including in their questions, and how well that maps onto the structure and content of your site.

If you are serious about dominating in AI answer engines, our Custom SEO Service is the right solution. With that, we will constantly monitor and improve your website, as well as all the other external components that go into reaching the top.