Your content is invisible to AI.

The shift you can't ignore.

Most of your traffic strategy was built for Google. But the people you want to reach are asking ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity instead.

If those answers don't cite you, you don't exist.

This guide shows you how to run any existing page through Claude and get a clear AEO audit you can act on today.

SEO got you ranked. AEO gets you cited.

SEO is the game you already know. You write a page, Google indexes it, someone searches, your page shows up in the list. The reader picks a link and clicks through.

AEO is a different game. AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization. Instead of ranking on a list, you're trying to get cited inside the answer that ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews are already writing. The reader never sees a list of links. They see one answer. Your job is to be inside that answer.

The mechanics are different too. Search engines crawl, rank, and link. Answer engines crawl, summarize, and quote. To get quoted, your content has to look like an answer, not like a landing page.

What AI answer engines actually pull from.

Answer engines aren't reading the way Google does. They're scanning for content that looks like it was written to be quoted. Five things move the needle.

The fifth factor sits underneath all four: a defensible source. The page reads like a person who knows the topic wrote it, not a content mill. If your page fails on three or more, it's invisible to AI answers no matter how well it ranks on Google.

The 15-minute audit.

Pick one page. Pull the URL. Open Claude. Run the prompt below. That's it.

The prompt does four things in one pass. It restates what your page is actually answering. It scores the page on the five AEO factors. It flags the specific paragraphs that would or wouldn't get quoted. And it gives you a rewrite plan you can hand to a writer or do yourself.

You're auditing this page for Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). 
AEO means optimizing content to be cited inside AI-generated answers 
from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
Here is the page content:
[PASTE FULL PAGE TEXT HERE]
Do four things in order:
1. State the single question this page is best positioned to answer. 
   Write it in the reader's words, the way someone would type it 
   into ChatGPT.
2. Score the page from 1 to 10 on each of these five AEO factors:
   - Clear question stated near the top
   - Direct answer in the first 1-2 sentences after the question
   - Specific numbers, names, dates, proper nouns
   - Short self-contained paragraphs
   - Reads like a person who knows the topic wrote it
3. Quote the 1-3 paragraphs from the page most likely to get cited 
   by an answer engine, and quote the 1-3 paragraphs least likely 
   to get cited. Explain why for each.
4. Give me a rewrite plan with the top 3 specific changes that would 
   most increase the page's chance of being cited. Be concrete. Tell 
   me what to change, not what to think about.

Paste into a new Claude conversation. Replace the bracketed section with your full page text.

You'll get a real audit in under a minute. The score gives you a baseline. The quoted paragraphs tell you what's working. The rewrite plan is your action list.

See the difference for yourself.

Here's the same page section before and after an AEO rewrite. Click between the tabs.

Run this prompt after the rewrite.

Once you've made changes, hand the new version back to Claude with this prompt to confirm it actually moved.

Here's the rewritten version of the page I audited earlier. 
[PASTE NEW PAGE TEXT]
Re-score it on the same five AEO factors. Tell me which scores 
moved and which didn't. If anything is still scoring below 7, 
give me one more specific change to fix it.

Paste into the same Claude conversation as your original audit so it has context.

If anything is still under a 7, you have one more rewrite to do. If everything is at 7 or higher, ship it and move to the next page.

Don't do this.

1. Don't audit your homepage first. Audit a real content page that ranks for a real question. Homepages are positioning, not answers.
2. Don't paste the URL and ask Claude to audit it. Paste the actual page text. Claude can't reliably read live URLs in a regular chat, and you'll get a hallucinated audit.
3. Don't try to score 10 out of 10 on every factor. A 7 or 8 across the board beats a 10 in one place and a 4 somewhere else.
4. Don't rewrite for AEO and break the page for humans. The five factors all make pages better for people too. If a change makes the page worse to read, undo it.
5. Don't audit one page and call it done. Pick your top 10 pages by traffic and run the audit on each one over a few weeks.

Three pages worth auditing today: your highest-traffic blog post from the last 12 months, your "how to" or "what is" page that gets the most organic search, and any service page where the title is a question or starts with "How." Run the audit on those three this week. You'll know within 45 minutes whether AEO is the bottleneck on your existing content.