The alphabet · AEO

Make your site quotable.

Engines lift answers; they don’t browse websites. AEO is the craft of giving them something worth lifting — with your name attached.

AEO pillar three of four · 20% of your score

Answer engine optimization — structuring your site so machines can quote you: schema that states your facts on the record, FAQs that match real questions, and content shaped as direct answers. It wins featured snippets today and feeds AI citations tomorrow.

See also: Local SEO · SEO · GEO · AIO

Why it matters

Three truths about AEO.

01

Engines lift, they don’t browse

An answer engine doesn’t read your site the way a person does — it extracts. Content formatted as questions with direct answers gets extracted; brochure copy gets skipped.

02

Schema is testimony

Structured data is you stating your hours, services, and service area in a language machines can’t misread. Your competitor who states it beats the one who makes engines guess.

03

Position zero beats position one

The answer box sits above every ranking. Once an engine can quote you cleanly, you stop competing on rank alone and start competing on being the answer itself.

In your scan

What Speak Local checks.

Every scan measures these — scored, prioritized, and re-checked on schedule. See the full platform for how the pillars combine.

Structured data — LocalBusiness, FAQPage & Person, plus JSON-LD coverage
Answer-shaped content — question headings with direct, quotable answers
SERP features — which tracked searches show a snippet, an AI Overview or People Also Ask
Authorship & trust — real people, credentials, E-E-A-T signals
LOCAL SEO AEO GEO AIO
AEO questions

Asked and answered.

What’s the difference between AEO and SEO?
SEO earns you a position in a list of links; AEO earns you the answer itself. They share a foundation — a healthy, crawlable site — but AEO adds structure: schema markup, FAQs, and content written so an engine can lift it verbatim. Speak Local scores them as separate pillars because you can rank well and still be unquotable.
What is answer-shaped content?
Content organized the way people actually ask: a question as the heading, a direct answer in the first sentence, supporting detail after. It’s the format engines extract for featured snippets and AI citations — and it happens to be genuinely useful to human readers, which is why it wins.
Does schema markup really matter?
Yes — it’s one of the highest-leverage fixes in the entire audit. Schema removes ambiguity about who you are, what you do, where, and when; it gates eligibility for rich results; and AI engines use it to ground their answers. Most local sites have almost none, which is exactly the opportunity.
What a check looks like

Not a grade. A sentence you can act on.

Every check reports what it found, the evidence it found it in, and the pages it affects — so the fix list is a work order, not a verdict.

Key pages answer the question they are about warn

4 of 11 service pages open with an answer in the first 120 words. The rest open with a heading and a paragraph of preamble.

answer-shaped: 4/11 · median words before first answer: 96

Lead with the answer, then support it. Put a direct one or two sentence answer immediately under the H1, then the detail beneath it. Engines quote the first passage that answers the question.

/services/roof-replacement /services/gutter-repair /services/siding +4 more