The short answer
Answer engine optimization works in three layers on top of classic SEO. First, retrievability: you let AI crawlers reach your pages by auditing robots.txt across the AI user agents and publishing an llms.txt and clean sitemap. Second, extractability: you put the answer near the top of the page, state it directly, and mark it up with clear headings and JSON-LD so an engine can lift it without guessing. Third, authority: you build the entity signals, corroborating pages, and real trust that lead engines to cite you.
Layer one: let the crawlers in
An engine cannot cite a page it never read. The first step is confirming that the AI user agents are allowed through robots.txt, that a clean sitemap exists, and that an llms.txt tells engines what is worth reading. A free scan can check AI-crawler access across 16 agents, your llms.txt, sitemap, JSON-LD, and metadata in one pass so you know what is blocking you.
Layer two: make the answer easy to extract
Once a crawler can read the page, the engine has to find a clean answer on it. That means leading with a direct response to the question, using clear headings, stating claims plainly, and adding JSON-LD so the structure is machine-readable. Pages that bury the answer under setup rarely get quoted.
Layer three: build the authority to be trusted
Engines lean on sources they trust. Strong entity salience, corroborating pages, and real authority (which traditional signals like backlinks and a healthy Domain Score still feed) make yours one of the few sources an engine is willing to cite.
Measure, fix, re-check
AEO is a loop. You run your category’s prompts, read citation rate, share of model, and sentiment per engine, ship the fixes, and re-check. See the AI citation tracking methodology for how the numbers are produced, or run the free AI visibility scan to see where your site stands today.