Answer Engine Optimisation

Help search and AI systems understand your public information

Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) helps search and AI systems discover and understand your public content. TrueCMS audits crawlability, content usefulness, structured data and published feeds, then identifies practical corrections. Indexing, citations and accurate AI answers are not guaranteed.

AEO builds on established SEO practices. Useful, accessible pages and evidence for your claims matter more than adding special files or extra schema types. Google's AI optimisation guidance explains the requirements and limits.

What the audit answers

• Discovery: Public responses, canonical URLs, robots directives, sitemap integrity and links between relevant pages.
• Answer usefulness: Clear service definitions, customer questions, evidence, authorship, dates and consistent organisational facts.
• Structured data: Page-appropriate entities, accurate URLs and agreement between JSON-LD and visible content. Markup describes information; it does not prove that information is true.
• Published interfaces: Existing JSON feeds and manifests checked for complete content, working links and correct response types where they have an intended consumer.
• Measurement readiness: Available search reports, referral data and crawler logs, with gaps recorded when access is unavailable.

What you receive

The audit provides a findings report with affected URLs, reproducible evidence, impact, prioritised recommendations and acceptance criteria. It separates confirmed defects from opportunities and checks that need account access. We agree the pages and systems in scope before work begins.

Implementation is scoped separately against those findings. Corrections can include content edits, metadata, structured data, templates, redirects and feed generation. Validation checks whether each agreed defect is resolved; it cannot establish future citation or revenue outcomes.

Access and boundaries

A public review can inspect delivered HTML and advertised resources. Repository access supports implementation analysis. Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools access is needed to inspect account settings and performance reports; analytics and verified crawler logs support traffic and access checks. Provide access through your organisation's approved process.

Without those accounts, the report records measurement and indexing as unverified. We do not infer real crawler access from a request that merely uses a bot's name. OpenAI distinguishes search discovery from model-training permissions in its crawler documentation.

An example from our own site

Our 5 September 2026 TrueCMS audit found that the published page-data feed omitted the AEO service, advertised a configuration URL that returned 404, and used a plugin manifest whose advertised resources redirected to the homepage.

These were observable interface defects: a consumer could not obtain the information the interface promised. The corresponding acceptance checks are that the feed includes the service, advertised resources return their intended content, and records agree with the visible pages. These findings establish a technical baseline, not a client case study or measured search uplift. Our AEO implementation guide explains the example and how to measure changes.

How progress is measured

Record a baseline before implementation, then compare the same pages and reporting dimensions after changes. Where available, use Google's Generative AI performance report for impressions and Bing AI Performance for citation activity. Review qualified enquiries and referral traffic separately: impressions and citations are not conversions.

Manual answer checks should record the prompt, engine, date, locale and cited URL. Individual answers vary and do not establish overall visibility or prove that a site change caused a result.

Pricing and next steps

• AEO Technical Audit: $1,200 (one-time). The agreed scope defines the pages and systems reviewed and the access-dependent checks available.
• Implementation: Quoted separately against prioritised findings and acceptance criteria.
• Ongoing review: Available through our support retainers.

Contact us to agree scope and access requirements before the audit begins.

Common questions

Can you guarantee an AI citation? No. Search and answer engines control selection. We improve technical eligibility and content clarity, and report observed outcomes.

Does every page need FAQ or other specialist schema? No. Use markup that accurately describes the visible content and meets the relevant feature rules. Google's structured data policies explain these constraints.

Do I need a custom feed or llms.txt? Only where there is a useful consumer or integration requirement. Google says llms.txt does not improve its visibility or rankings. Existing interfaces should still work reliably; their presence alone is not an AEO result.