How to get into AI answers: answer engine optimisation in plain words
People increasingly ask an assistant instead of a search engine, and it names two or three companies instead of ten links. What it takes to be on that list.
SEO fought for a place among ten links. Today the list is often not shown at all: the assistant reads the sources and answers itself, naming one or two companies. Getting into that answer is a different job.
How an assistant differs from search
- It retells rather than ranks: you need to be easy to retell
- It takes facts, not impressions: "we do quality work" is never quoted
- It reads structure — headings, lists, markup — faster than prose
- It checks consistency: numbers that disagree across pages cost trust
1. Answer in the first paragraph
A page that spends three paragraphs warming up loses to one that answers immediately and elaborates below. The rule serves humans and machines equally.
2. Markup is not decoration
Structured data is the only way to tell a machine what something is: an article, a service, a vacancy, a price, an organisation. Without it your page is text; with it, it is a record the assistant can use confidently.
- Organization — who you are, where you are, how to reach you
- Service and Offer — what you do and what it costs
- FAQPage — questions and answers on the page itself
- BlogPosting and Breadcrumb — articles and where they sit
3. Facts that can be checked
"Working since 2019, 40 projects, office in Yerevan" is quotable. "Market leaders" is not.
4. The page must read without JavaScript
Many crawlers do not run scripts. If your text appears only after an app boots, the page is empty to them. One-minute test: turn JavaScript off and open the site.
5. One language, one page
An assistant answers in the language of the question and looks for a source in that language. A language switch that changes the text without changing the address throws away three chances in four.
What not to do
- Writing "for the AI": it reads what humans read, only more attentively to structure
- Hiding keywords — it is detected and it hurts
- Publishing ten similar pages instead of one good one
In short: AEO is SEO taken to honesty. Clear structure, direct answers, checkable facts, and markup that tells the machine what the page tells the person.
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