What an AEO tool needs to do
Answer engines don't show ten blue links. They write one answer, name a handful of brands and cite a few sources. To optimize for that, you need to know four things, and act on them:
- Are you in the answer?: for the questions your customers actually ask, on every engine that matters, over time.
- Who is named instead, and how?: competitors' mentions, where each brand is placed, and whether answers recommend or warn against it.
- Where the answers come from: the pages and sites each engine cites, so you know where to be mentioned or linked.
- Can AI read your site?: whether AI crawlers fetch your pages at all, and which ones.
How SEODojo covers each one
| AEO task | In SEODojo |
|---|---|
| Track answers | Tracked prompts on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini (their real apps), Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Claude, DeepSeek, daily or weekly, per country and language |
| Benchmark competitors | Visibility, share of voice, position and tone for you and each competitor |
| Find source gaps | The sites cited in answers that leave you out, and which of your own pages get cited |
| Check what AI says about you | Brand accuracy checks against your own site |
| Check AI crawler access | AI crawler analytics through Cloudflare: which bots visit and what they read |
| Fix the gaps | One click sends a prompt to Autopilot, which writes, scores and publishes an article |
Why real app answers matter for AEO
The ChatGPT app and the OpenAI API don't give the same answer to the same question. Optimizing against API answers means optimizing for something your customers never see. SEODojo asks ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini through their real apps, and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode come straight from Google's results.
AEO and SEO in one place
AI answers lean heavily on pages that already rank and get cited. That's why SEODojo keeps AEO next to classic SEO: keyword research, SERP analysis, an editor that scores drafts against what ranks, page audits, rank tracking and publishing. The same article that earns a Google ranking is often the page an AI answer cites.
Frequently asked questions
- What is answer engine optimization?
- Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of getting your brand named and your pages cited in answers from AI assistants and answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews.
- Is AEO different from SEO?
- It builds on SEO. Answer engines rely on pages that are crawlable, authoritative and cited elsewhere, so good SEO helps. AEO adds measuring the answers themselves, the sources they cite, and whether AI crawlers can read your site.
- What's the difference between AEO and GEO?
- They're largely two names for the same thing. GEO (generative engine optimization) is the term used more in research and by marketers focused on generative AI; AEO is the older term from voice and featured-snippet optimization. SEODojo covers both.
- How much does it cost?
- There's a free plan for manual checks. Pro is $49/month with 50 tracked prompts, 15 of them checked daily; Scale is $149/month with 150 tracked prompts, 50 of them daily.
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