AEO makes your site quotable.

Search engines and AI assistants quote short passages from web pages. AEO is the work of giving them a clear answer to quote, with your name attached.

AEO 20% of your score

Answer engine optimization: structuring your site so search engines and AI assistants can quote you. That means schema that states your facts, FAQs that match real questions, and content written as direct answers. It wins featured snippets and feeds AI citations.

See also: AI local SEO · SEO · GEO · AIO

Read: What is AEO? · AEO for local businesses

Why AEO matters

Answer engines pull out direct answers

An answer engine scans your pages for passages it can extract. Content written as a question with a direct answer gets used, and brochure copy gets skipped.

Schema states your facts clearly

Structured data states your hours, services and service area in a format search engines can’t misread. A business that spells this out beats one that leaves engines guessing.

The answer box sits above the top result

It appears above every ranking. Once an engine can quote you cleanly, you compete to be the answer itself as well as on rank.

What Speak Local checks

Every scan measures and scores these, sorts them by priority, and re-checks them 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

Common questions

What’s the difference between AEO and SEO?
SEO earns you a position in a list of links. AEO earns you the answer itself. Both rest on a healthy, crawlable site, and AEO adds structure: schema markup, FAQs, and content written so an engine can quote it word for word. Speak Local scores them as separate pillars because a page can rank well and still be hard to quote.
What is answer-shaped content?
Content organized the way people ask: a question as the heading, a direct answer in the first sentence, supporting detail after. Engines extract this format for featured snippets and AI citations, and human readers find it useful too, which is why it wins.
Does schema markup really matter?
Yes. It’s one of the highest-leverage fixes in the audit. Schema removes doubt about who you are, what you do, where, and when. It decides eligibility for rich results, and AI engines use it to ground their answers. Most local sites have almost none, which is the opportunity.

What you get for each issue

Each issue shows what the scan found, the pages it affects and how to fix it, so you can work straight down the list.

An issue in Speak Local's Site Audit: what the scan found, how to fix it and the pages affected
From an example workspace for a fictional heating and air company. The audit is a real scan of a test site.

See your AEO score.

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