Guide · updated 2026-10-02
The AEO guide
Answer engine optimization from first principles to a weekly routine: how AI engines decide what to cite, how to measure where you stand, what to fix on your site, what to write, where to earn citations, and how to know whether any of it worked. Six chapters, about thirty minutes.
- 01
How answer engines choose what to say
What happens between a buyer's question and an AI answer: retrieval, query fan-out, passage selection and citation, and why it matters for your brand.
- 02
Measuring AI visibility
How to build a prompt set, which metrics to record, how often to run them, and how to read a baseline without fooling yourself.
- 03
Technical foundations: can engines read you?
Crawler access, JavaScript rendering, structured data, llms.txt and the other checks that decide whether an engine can read a page at all.
- 04
Content that gets cited
How to write and structure pages so an answer engine can quote them: answer-first sections, question headings, tables, evidence, authorship and dates.
- 05
Earning citations off your own site
Why most citations go to third-party pages, how to find the sources that shape your category, and how to earn a place on them.
- 06
Operating cadence and attribution
A weekly loop for AI visibility work, how to tell whether a change worked, and how to report it alongside search rankings.
Put the guide into practice
LeapScope tracks your prompts daily on every supported engine, shows the sources behind each answer, and audits your pages, so the loop in chapter six runs on data instead of guesses.