I’m Keith Groben. For years the job was simple to describe: rank on Google. Now there’s a second search happening, and most local businesses don’t know they’re losing it. People are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s own AI for a recommendation — and those engines answer by citing sources they can actually read.
If a machine can’t read your site, it can’t recommend you. That’s what AEO is about.
What is AEO, and how is it different from SEO?
SEO got your site ranked on a page of blue links a human clicks through. AEO — Answer Engine Optimization — gets your site understood and cited by an AI that’s writing the answer for the customer. Same goal, found and trusted, but a different reader.
The old reader was a person skimming. The new reader is a model parsing structure. It wants a clear, plain answer to the question someone asked, in a format it can lift with confidence. If your page buries the answer in marketing fog, the AI skips you and cites the competitor who said it plainly.
What makes a site AI-readable?
Four things, and they’re measurable.
- Clean structure. Headings that map to real questions. One clear answer under each.
- Schema. Machine-readable markup that tells the engine what your business is, what it does, and where. Every page R7 ships carries SEO and AEO schema for exactly this reason.
- Plain answers. Say what you do, for whom, where, in words a model can quote without guessing.
- Speed and security. A fast, secure, mobile-first site gets crawled, trusted, and cited. A slow one gets passed over.
This is the same tech stack Anthropic, Cloudflare, and Nike build on. Not because it’s fashionable — because it’s the foundation that makes a site fast, secure, and legible to the engines doing the recommending.
Why a 2022 brochure can’t compete
A brochure site was built once and left alone. No schema, slow on a phone, vague copy written to impress instead of answer. A human might forgive it. An answer engine won’t — it just moves on to a source it can read. The business that looks frozen never enters the recommendation.
You can fix the chain, but it takes a site built to be read by both people and machines.