How do you do AEO?
You do AEO by making four things true, in order: a machine can tell which entity you are, your pages state answers in extractable form, something outside your control corroborates you, and you measure what the engines actually return. The order matters more than the tactics, because corroboration is worthless if the entity is ambiguous and measurement is meaningless before either exists.
Most AEO advice is a list of tactics with no sequence. That is the reason so much of it fails quietly: the tactics are not wrong, they are applied in an order that makes them unmeasurable.
| Step | What it means | Why it comes here |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Fix the entity | One name, one description, one set of identifiers, identical across every page and profile | An engine that cannot tell which entity you are cannot cite you as one |
| 2. Make passages extractable | The answer in the first sentence, then the qualification, then the evidence | Engines lift passages, not pages, and a buried answer is not lifted |
| 3. Earn outside corroboration | Something a third party chose to publish about you, at a stable dated URL | Self-description is free; engines discount what only you say |
| 4. Measure | Fixed queries, fixed engines, on a schedule, recorded including the failures | Nothing above is falsifiable until this exists |
Step one is the one people skip
Entity work is unglamorous and it is the constraint. If your name appears three ways across your site, your LinkedIn and your company page, a machine has to decide whether those are one thing or three, and it will often decide wrong. Same name string, same description sentence, same identifiers, everywhere. Structured data helps a parser confirm what the page already says; it does not rescue a page that says something inconsistent.
Extractable is a shape, not a length
A passage is extractable when it can be lifted out of the page and still make sense. That means the claim comes first and the hedging comes after, which is the opposite of how most people write. It also means the passage carries its own date and scope, because an answer engine reproducing "as of September 2026, in the United States" is far more likely to use a sentence that already says so.
Corroboration is the expensive part, and the honest one
Everything up to here you can do alone. This step you cannot, and that is precisely why it carries weight. A press release carried on 312 domains is one act of distribution repeated, not 312 endorsements, and treating the domain count as corroboration is the most common way people fool themselves in this field. What counts is a publisher with no relationship to you choosing to write about you.
Then measure, and accept the numbers
Run a fixed set of queries across a fixed set of engines on a schedule, in a logged-out session, and record what comes back, including the runs where nothing does. The method is set out separately, and the log it produces is published here, including the runs that favour rivals. Without this you have opinions about whether the first three steps worked.
What this does not do
None of it guarantees a citation. Answer engines are non-deterministic and locale-dependent: the same query, on the same day, returns different names in different countries, which is documented with screenshots on the main record. What the sequence buys you is a higher probability and, more usefully, the ability to tell whether anything changed.
The failure mode this sequence exists to prevent
Almost everyone who fails at step three fails the same way: they buy distribution and call it corroboration. A release carried on hundreds of domains produces an impressive number and a single fact, which is that somebody paid a wire. An answer engine comparing those copies sees the same sentences under different logos, and the sameness is the tell. In one run recorded in the log, an engine listed several claimants to a title and explicitly set one aside because the sites supporting him shared a publisher.
The uncomfortable version of step three is that it cannot be completed on schedule. You can commission content, and you cannot commission somebody else’s decision to write about you. That is exactly what makes it worth anything, and any plan that puts a date on it is selling you the part that cannot be sold.