AEO Content Writing Guide: How to Appear in LLMs

For decades, the goal of SEO efforts was to climb the search engine results page. But the game has changed. Generative AI and LLMs have started to replace search engines, as users have come to expect a direct, synthesized response. 

This phenomenon has led to the inception of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). AEO is the strategic evolution of SEO, focusing on making your content the authoritative source that AI cites when generating an answer.

This article will provide an actionable guide on how to create content that wins, ensuring your content is not only discoverable but also becomes a long-standing part of the web of knowledge that AI relies on.

What Is Content AEO?

AEO is a strategic approach to content creation that goes beyond traditional SEO. While classic SEO aims for top rankings on the search engine results page (SERP), AEO’s goal is to create content that can be understood, summarized, and cited by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.

Essentially, it's about becoming the trusted source that AI uses to generate answers. The practice has three core principles:

• Clarity: Providing a direct answer that is concise and clear. AI should be able to scan your content and find the singular response to a query without having to interpret or synthesize multiple points.
• Authority: Earning trust through H-E-E-A-T (Helpfulness, Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) signals. AI models, particularly those that operate upon Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), are trained to prioritize credible and authoritative content to prevent the spread of misinformation.
• Structure: Presenting information in a format that AI can easily parse. Proper formatting includes using headings, lists, and tables.

Users are no longer just typing keywords into a search bar; they're asking conversational questions and expecting a definitive answer in return, and AEO is the blueprint for providing that answer.

SEO vs. AEO

To understand AEO's power, consider a user searching: "how to choose a digital marketing agency." The difference between an SEO approach and an AEO one lies in the structure and intent of the content.

SEO

• Focuses on a comprehensive, long-form guide.
• Buries the main answer within a broad introduction.
• Requires the user (and AI) to synthesize information from multiple paragraphs.
• Relies on overall page authority to rank, not on a clear, single answer.

AEO

• Leads with a direct answer to the query right at the top.
• Utilizes scannable formats such as bulleted lists to break down complex information.
• Strategically includes an FAQ section to address related People Also Ask queries.

This optimized structure makes it incredibly easy for an LLM or AI Overview to extract the key points and present them. By front-loading the answer and using clear formatting, your content becomes the ideal source for an AI to cite, increasing your AI visibility and establishing your authority.

How to Write Content for AEO

This section is the core of your AEO content strategy, as an actionable framework for creating content that not only traditionally ranks but is chosen as the source for an AI answer.

1. Research & Analyze Your AI Landscape

1.1. Understand User Intent & Map Questions

You should begin your research by using the People Also Ask box in Google, which will clue you in to the natural language queries of your audience. For example, if you were trying to sell gaming headsets, you might type into Google “Best Gaming headsets 2025.” 

Then, check out the People Also Ask box on the bottom of the SERP and put these questions into LLMs to see what content is generated, and ensure your content addresses that information. This practice is critical as it proactively addresses users’ needs, helping you become the source and build visibility. 

Pro tip: You can also use AlsoAsked.com and AnswerThePublic to discover what related topics users are searching and see how they would ask them conversationally.  

You can play around with LLMs and ask them to generate long-tail keywords, conversational queries, and contextually relevant phrases related to your topic. 

Pro tip: LLMs favor conversational language. Use exact user phrasing (e.g., "how do I connect my CRM to a chatbot?") as content H1s, H2s, and H3s. 

1.2. Analyze Competitor & AI Responses

As you begin testing the keywords and topics you want to target, make sure you test them across multiple platforms. As you do this, observe:

• Which sources do they cite?
• What language patterns do they prefer?
• Where your brand or competitors show up (or don't).

Then, run your brand name through the same platforms to understand your current perception. Create a spreadsheet to track target queries, AI Overview triggers, cited sources, content format, and your visibility versus competitors.

Pro Tip: Give your preferred LLM a list of all the top-ranking/cited articles for your topic, paste your written article in, and ask it to identify any content gaps. Then, you can address information in your article that was absent. Focus on improving the quality of your competitors' pieces. 

1.3. Utilize AI Visibility Tools

Use Goodie for a comprehensive analysis of your brand's perception by LLMs, including visibility scores, sentiment analysis, and competitor performance. This information will help you understand what you’re doing right and wrong, and help you find areas you can target in the future. 

2. Create Optimized Content for AI Consumption

While optimizing your content for AI has some overlap with SEO, here are some key ways to build upon that foundation. 

Prioritize Answer-First Content

• Begin with a direct, concise answer to the primary question within the first 50 words of your content. 
• Follow the concise answer with detailed context and supporting information to establish topical authority. 
• Pro tip: This is where your research is going to come into play – incorporate the insights and unique perspectives that your competitors didn’t address to increase your chances of being treated as the definitive answer by AI. 

Structure for Clarity & Scannability

• Use clear H1, H2, and H3 headings, formatting subheadings as questions where appropriate (e.g., "How does X work?", "What are the benefits of Y?").
• Break up long paragraphs using bullet points, numbered lists, and comparison tables.
• Create dedicated FAQ sections on your pages that directly answer common questions.
• Pro Tip: Think of writing in “chunkable” content as speaking AI’s language. Cleaner, more explicitly structured content is easier for LLMs to understand.

Focus on Factual Accuracy & Trustworthiness (H-E-E-A-T)

• Ensure all claims are supported by credible, up-to-date sources, cited with links when possible.
• Incorporate author bylines with bios and credentials, and include customer testimonials and other trust signals.
• Develop long-form, expert-led content that showcases your Helpfulness, Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (H-E-E-A-T).
• Pro tip: Write about what nobody else is. Niche brands, strategies, etc. This will get you noticed by AI and is a key principle of AEO strategy: Be the source. 

Use Natural, Conversational Language

• Write in a natural, helpful tone, as if speaking to a friend, to resonate better with AI models trained on natural language.
• For voice search, keep responses brief (under 30 seconds read time) and consider reading them aloud to ensure they flow well and sound human, not a machine-like. 

Integrate Multimodal Content

Integrate visuals like explainer videos, charts, or infographics, ensuring they are tagged and captioned. This type of content demonstrates breadth across a topic, signaling you as an authoritative source. 

Video & Rich Results

• Transcripts & Captions: Always include an accurate transcript and captions for every video. This provides text for the AI to crawl and understand, making your content discoverable.
• Descriptive Text: The text surrounding your video, like the title, description, and any introductory paragraphs, should be rich with keywords and provide a clear summary of the video's content.

Image Optimization

• Captions and Context: The text around the image should provide additional context, helping AI understand its purpose. This is important for charts, infographics, and product photos, as they are signals of expertise and originality.

Audio & Podcasts

• Full Transcripts: Similar to video, you need to provide a full transcript for a podcast. Publish the transcript as a dedicated blog post or on the episode's page, which makes your audio content accessible and citable.
• Structured Show Notes: Create show notes that act as a summary and table of contents for the episode. Use bullet points for key takeaways, numbered lists for steps, and H3 headings for each topic discussed. This structure helps an AI parse the episode's content, making it easy to extract specific answers.

Build Interconnected Topical Expertise

• Build topic clusters; a comprehensive Pillar Page on a broad topic, supported by a series of detailed cluster pages on related subtopics. This interlinked structure signals to LLMs that your brand is a definitive source on a subject, making your content a more attractive candidate for citation.

3. Build Authority & Distribute Content

Similar to SEO, building authority will help maximize your digital visibility. 

Strengthen Brand Authority

• Consistently publish content, encompassing a wide breadth of topics that your team is knowledgeable about. Remember, unique, in-depth content stands out to AI. 
• Earn quality backlinks and citations from reputable, high-authority sites.
• Actively seek unlinked brand mentions in third-party articles, forums, and reviews.
• Ensure a comprehensive and up-to-date "About Us" page, with clear bios and credentials, as this can boost authority and credibility signals to AI. 
• Maintain a consistent brand name, tone, and positioning across all platforms.
• Pro tip: Consider launching a Wikipedia page for your brand if you don’t already have one, as LLMs love to pull from Wikipedia.  

Strategic Content Distribution

• Repurpose core content into various formats (blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics) and distribute across relevant platforms.
• Contribute guest articles to authoritative industry publications. 
• Actively participate in relevant online communities and forums (e.g., Reddit, Quora).
• Leverage social media to amplify your content’s reach and encourage engagement.
• Use Goodie's optimization hub to create a "media map" to guide PR and outreach efforts.

Remember the Human Element

• Cut back on AI fluff. While AI can be useful for providing research, content, and drafts, it often lacks the originality and insights that a human mind holds.
• AI can “hallucinate,” or provide inaccurate information, which is why humans must review any content generated by AI to ensure credibility and trustworthiness.

4. Measure & Continuously Improve Your Content AEO Strategy

Now that your content’s published, you need to monitor regularly for AI visibility. 

Measure AI Visibility

Regularly prompt AI across multiple different platforms, with questions related to your brand and industry, to see where and how you appear in its answers. It might be helpful to perform comprehensive performance testing once a week, depending on your brand’s size. 

As you do this, track:

• Citation count, which is when, where, and how often your brand is cited in AI outputs.
• Inclusion rate, which is the percentage of the target prompts where your brand appears.
• Direct traffic from AI summaries.
• Sentiment in AI outputs (is your brand being represented positively, negatively, or neutrally?)

Continuous Adaptation

As you monitor your brand and content performance, analyze which content formats and topics generate the most AI visibility, focusing on the most successful approaches. 

As you do this, regularly update high-performing content with fresh data and information while staying on top of any algorithm changes and industry news. For example, as Perplexity and OpenAI launch AI browsers, shift your content strategy to align with its outputs. 

• Pro Tip: Establish weekly, monthly, and quarterly routines for checking AI visibility metrics, auditing content, and making strategy adjustments.

Audit Existing Content

Now that you know how to best optimize your content for AI, review your top-performing content to ensure it adheres to the outlined standards. Some questions you may want to ask yourself while performing this audit are:

• Does this content directly answer a specific question?
• Is the answer presented concisely and at the beginning?
• Could this content be easily summarized by an LLM without losing its core message?
• Does this content demonstrate expertise and trustworthiness?

What Is an Example of AEO?

Let's look at a concrete example of content optimized for AI. Imagine your target audience is a small business owner searching for “what are the best small business CRMs?” This archetypal query would produce "best of" listicles, making it a prime target for an LLM to synthesize a ranked list.

Non-AEO Content

A non-AEO article that targets this query might be titled, "Your Complete Guide to CRM Software for Small Business."

• Structure: It would have a long introduction discussing the importance of CRMs. The article would then have an H2 for each CRM, detailing its features in several paragraphs of text. The key takeaways would be buried within the copy, making it hard to compare them at a glance.
• Result: A traditional search engine might rank this page highly due to its comprehensiveness and keyword optimization. However, an LLM would struggle to identify the "best" options or key differences. It would have to read and synthesize a significant amount of text to generate a summary.

AEO Content 

Now, let's re-imagine the content through an AEO lens. The article would be titled, "The 5 Best CRMs for Small Business (2025)."

• Front-Loaded Answer: The first paragraph would contain a direct answer to the user's query: "The best small business CRMs for 2025 are HubSpot, Zoho CRM, Salesforce Essentials, Pipedrive, and Freshsales. They are chosen based on a balance of features, scalability, and price."
• Actionable Formatting: Immediately following this, the content would use a comparison table to break down the key features of each CRM: pricing, key features, best for, and a star rating. This table, often a rich snippet target, is designed for AI and human scannability.
• Strategic FAQs: The article would have a dedicated FAQ section that answers common questions like “what is the cheapest CRM for small businesses?” and “what CRM do startups use?” Each question would be an H2, with a concise answer immediately following.
• Result: This approach provides AI with a structured, definitive source of information. The front-loaded answer and clear table allow the LLM to understand the core topic and extract the data it needs to generate an answer. The FAQ section addresses related queries, increasing the chances of it being cited. 

Conclusion 

The increasing popularity of AI is a sign that the era of content quantity is yielding to the era of content quality. In a world awash with AI-generated text, the only way to win is to be the source worth citing. By structuring your content to be both definitive for algorithms and humans, you create an invaluable asset for your brand. 

Remember: Your job is to be the guiding light for algorithms by pinpointing authoritative content, and forging it into explicit information that an AI cannot replicate, but cite.