Beyond SEO: Enter AEO
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) got us here. Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) will get us to what's next.
AEO is the practice of optimising your content to be cited and accurately represented by AI systems — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and the growing ecosystem of AI-powered answer engines.
At ParadoxSEO, we've developed a 16-aspect AEO framework that assesses your AI visibility across three dimensions: Citability, Accuracy, and Discoverability.
The 16 AEO Aspects
Citability (6 Aspects)
1. Factual Density Does your content contain citable facts, statistics, and data points? AI systems prefer content they can quote with confidence.
2. Attribution Clarity Can AI systems correctly attribute information to your brand? Clear bylines, structured data, and consistent naming help.
3. Source Authority Are you citing credible sources? AI systems weight your authority based on who you reference.
4. Uniqueness Score Is your content meaningfully different from what's already in the training corpus? Me-too content won't get cited.
5. Quote-Worthiness Do you have memorable phrases, frameworks, or formulations that AI might quote directly?
6. Definition Quality When you define terms, are those definitions clear, accurate, and comprehensive enough to be reused?
Accuracy (5 Aspects)
7. Brand Representation When AI describes your brand, is it accurate? Inaccurate brand descriptions indicate poor AI visibility.
8. Product/Service Accuracy Are your products and services correctly described in AI responses?
9. Expertise Recognition Does AI recognise your expertise in your domain? This affects whether you get cited for expert opinions.
10. Recency Signals Can AI determine when your content was published or updated? Freshness matters for certain queries.
11. Contradiction Avoidance Is your content internally consistent? Contradictory statements confuse AI systems.
Discoverability (5 Aspects)
12. Entity Recognition Does Google's Knowledge Graph recognise your brand? Entity status improves AI visibility.
13. Structured Data Completeness Is your structured data comprehensive enough for AI to understand your content?
14. AI Crawler Access Can GPTBot, PerplexityBot, and other AI crawlers access your content?
15. Content Accessibility Is your content in formats AI can easily parse? Heavy JavaScript, PDFs, and images reduce accessibility.
16. Cross-Platform Presence Are you visible across platforms AI systems reference — Wikipedia, industry databases, social platforms?
Scoring Methodology
Each aspect is scored 0-4:
| Score | Meaning | |-------|---------| | 0 | Absent — No evidence of optimisation | | 1 | Ad Hoc — Inconsistent implementation | | 2 | Developing — Partial implementation | | 3 | Defined — Systematic implementation | | 4 | Optimising — Best-in-class with ongoing improvement |
Overall AEO Score = Average across 16 aspects × 25 (to give a 0-100 score)
Benchmarks by Industry
| Industry | Average AEO Score | Top Quartile | |----------|------------------|--------------| | SaaS | 58 | 72+ | | E-commerce | 51 | 65+ | | Media/Publishing | 67 | 82+ | | Financial Services | 45 | 61+ | | Healthcare | 42 | 58+ |
Quick Wins for AEO
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The Future of AEO
AEO is not replacing SEO — it's extending it. The same principles apply: create valuable content, build authority, make it accessible. But the audience now includes algorithms that synthesise, summarise, and cite.
Sites that ignore AEO will watch their content train AI models without receiving credit. Sites that embrace AEO will become trusted sources in the AI-powered information ecosystem.
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*Want your AEO Score? Run a ParadoxSEO audit that includes our full 16-aspect AI Visibility assessment.*