From a time to benefit perspective, marketing is perhaps one of the most important things a builder-founder can do.
But, for some, marketing is also one of the most hated parts of the job. Sometimes it's easier to focus on shipping features.
Features provide a sense of accomplishment of movement. Marketing, especially SEO, is slow and unforgiving. You're either ranking or you're not. Or at least that used to be the case.
With the rise of AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) the marketing job has gotten a lot harder. Now it's about doing well in search, but also figuring out how to get your brand favorably cited in AI answers.
Unfortunately, measuring a brand's presence in ChatGPT and other agents is extremely difficult. SEO companies are racing to figure out how to capture this vital information. In the meantime, we have to figure this out for ourselves.
I'm not a SEO marketer, just a founder like many of you working to understand this new world. And, I'm doing it on my own in addition to everything else required to build a business.
But, because many conversations about AEO are missing some critical details, I thought I'd share my perspective on some key concepts. And, share a free tool I have developed to help builders get on the right path to having their sites seen by agents indexing the Web.
What is E-E-A-T?
The first thing you need to understand is E-E-A-T. This stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. ChatGPT and other agents will take a range of factors into account when determining whether to cite an organiation in respose to a user's question.
And, despite popular belief, the search process isn't a one-and-done affair. Instead, AI agents will conduct multiple searches on a topic, often starting broad and then narrowing their focus as they get closer to answer to present to a user. When asked a question they may:
- Conduct a broad search to get the 'lay of the land'
- Execute a second search to find more information on organizations or people surfaced in search results
- Complete further searches to round out the answers they get.
For each search, agents will take into account the E-E-A-T formula to determine what to provide as an answer. They are trained to be as helpful as possible, so that means getting insights that are trustworthy and highly relevant to the user's query.
Google outlined the E-E-A-T framework and other agents take this into account when presenting answers. It is:
- Experience: The entity/person writing the content has to have established experience in an area. Deep articles that indicate experience, such as case studies or personal insights work best. Tying the content to a specific person, not just a brand can be effective. From a personal perspective, I've noticed that when I develop content and include a byline with my experience in an area, that it makes a difference when I look up my company using AI. My experience is cited in answers I'm provided with.
- Expertise: Having a good technical understanding of a topic can demonstrate expertise. Don't just summarize a topic. Go deep show that you know what you're talking about. Break down ideas and answer questions others may have proactively
- Authoritativeness: This is challenging because it requires generating signals that your content (or you) are cited by others. Providing guest posts for established blogs, appearing on podcasts or being quoted by the media can have a very large impact on this metric
- Trustworthiness: Easy ways to establish trust, which is one of the most important indicators, is citing sources. If your business is managing user data in any way, providing trust signals that the information is carefully managed is one example. One thing that helps with humans and AI is creating a Trust Center, which can provide information about how information is protected. Or provide information about data sources and other trust signals, such as sources cited.
I'll be the first to admit that mastering AEO isn't a short-term project. Each day, I work on some part of the puzzle. But, once I learned about and studied E-E-A-T, it helped the work become more structured. I could say, "I'm going to work on Authority today," and break down the process into manageable chunks.
The Missing Piece: Structure
So, in a lot of content I've seen about E-E-A-T, the importance of site structure is often overlooked. Getting AI to cite a site depends as much on the 'invisible' parts as what's on the page.
This includes:
- Structuring content properly: Machines need to be able to read your site easily and get important organizational data from it
- Not blocking bots: This is mistake #1 I see on sites. They don't invite bots (and AI crawlers) in to scan and index the content
- Not having the right agent-friendly metadata: This includes llm.txt and a well-designed robots.txt
I've been spending time analyzing sites using a free AEO/GEO readiness tool I developed. It's surprising to me how many well-established sites fail on a lot of key AEO structure measures. If you get the structure right, you'll be ahead of 90% of the competition
I hope this helps other founders looking to make sense of AEO and how to get ready for a world where agents are the main consumers of your site.
I'm Fard Johnmar. I've been engineering AI systems since ChatGPT launched in late 2022, creating novel architectures, optimizing memory, and maximizing multi-LLM coordination. Now I'm focused on agentic security and creating new products and services for the autonomous AI era. My first project in this area is the AI Security Guard, the platform for securing autonomous AI. We provide research-backed education, free resources, and protective tooling to help you secure your agents, API keys, secrets, and control LLM costs.
