Stage 01
Answer first rewriting
Every H2 becomes a direct question a buyer might type. The first sentence after the H2 answers it in one line. This is the exact pattern AEO engines lift as citations.
AEO, Answer Engine Optimization
Be the answer AI engines quote when your buyers ask.
AEO is the discipline of getting your brand lifted as a clean citation inside AI answer engines. RankSmith structures content and schema so that when a buyer asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews a question in your category, your site is the paragraph that gets quoted.
From R1 500 per month
The problem
Why do AI engines cite your competitor and not you?
AI answer engines do not crawl the way Google does. They pull short, self contained passages from pages that are structured as questions and answers, marked up with FAQPage schema, and hosted on sites that pass their crawler filters. Most South African brand sites fail on all three.
How RankSmith runs AEO
A four stage method, repeated every engagement.
Stage 02
FAQ and Article schema
Every question block ships with FAQPage JSON-LD. Every long form article ships with Article schema. Schema is not decorative, it is the interface AI engines read.
Stage 03
Crawler allow listing
We update robots.txt to explicitly allow GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google Extended, and the other major AI crawlers, and we ship a valid llms.txt file pointing to the most citable pages.
Stage 04
Citation tracking
We run monthly prompts against ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews for your target queries, and track how often your brand gets named and quoted. The trend line is the deliverable.
What you get
Deliverables, written into the contract.
- Answer first content rewrites across the full site
- FAQPage and Article schema on every applicable page
- robots.txt and llms.txt rewritten for AI crawlers
- Monthly AI citation tracking report
- Quarterly prompt set review and expansion
Outcomes we target
The numbers this engagement is built to move.
- 01First citations in Perplexity and Bing Copilot within 14 days of launch
- 02Recurring citations in ChatGPT and Claude within 30 days
- 03Measurable lift in branded prompt share across AI engines
AEO questions
What people ask about AEO before they book a call.
These are the questions South African founders and marketing leads ask on a first AEO call. The answers are written the way a RankSmith lead would answer them in person.
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization. It is the discipline of getting your content lifted as a citation inside AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. SEO targets the ten blue links on a Google results page. AEO targets the single paragraph an AI engine quotes in its synthesised answer. Both matter in 2026 and RankSmith runs them as one joined up programme.
Ready when you are
Ready to run AEO with RankSmith?
Book a thirty minute strategy call. We will walk through your current site, your current visibility in Google and in AI engines, and where an honest AEO programme can move the number first.