Getting cited by AI assistants: what AEO actually involves

Search did not disappear, it split. Some people still scan ten blue links. A growing number ask an assistant and read one answer. If your site is not quotable, you are invisible to the second group no matter how well you rank for the first.

The short answer

Answer engine optimisation means writing pages an assistant can lift a correct, attributable answer from: a direct answer near the top, question-shaped headings, comparison tables, plain factual claims, and structured data that agrees with the visible page. It sits on top of normal technical SEO — it does not replace it.

Why assistants pick one source over another

• The answer is early. Two or three sentences that stand alone, before the story about your company.
• The question is visible. Headings phrased the way people actually ask.
• Facts are separable. Tables, lists and definitions can be quoted without context collapsing.
• Claims are checkable. Specific and verifiable beats confident and vague.
• The markup agrees. Structured data that matches what a reader sees.
• The page is reachable. Server-rendered content, crawlable, and assistant crawlers not blocked in robots.txt.

What to do, in order

• Give every important page one job and one primary question
• Open with the answer, then earn the rest of the read
• Convert your comparison arguments into actual tables
• Add Organization, Service, Article and breadcrumb structured data that reflects the page
• Allow the assistant crawlers you want to be read by
• Keep pages fast and server-rendered so nothing depends on a script running
• Link internally so the strongest pages pass authority to the ones that answer questions

What it does not mean

It does not mean stuffing keywords, and it does not mean publishing volume. Assistants are unusually good at ignoring padding. One genuinely useful page outperforms ten thin ones.

How we do it

Every page we build opens with a quotable answer, uses question-shaped subheadings, carries structured data and is server-rendered. That is described in SEO and AEO work, and it is the approach behind KrugerCowne.com. If you want it applied to your site, book a consultation.