How should a Head of SEO approach AEO?

If you’re a Head of SEO wondering “how does AEO affect me?” The answer is simple: you now own visibility in two places at once. Traditional search results still matter, but AI-generated answers increasingly shape shortlists before a user clicks anything.

That changes what “winning” looks like. You can lose traffic and still influence decisions if your brand is mentioned and cited as the source. Or you can keep rankings and still lose the narrative if AI systems describe your category, pricing model, or differentiation incorrectly.

The good news: AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) doesn’t replace SEO. It rewards the same fundamentals (technical clarity, content quality, authority), but raises the bar for consistency and extractability so your pages can be safely quoted.

What AEO changes for SEO leaders

AEO is the practice of increasing the likelihood that answer engines select your pages as sources and represent your brand accurately when users ask category questions.

For Heads of SEO, the shift is practical:

• Visibility expands beyond rankings: you can be influential without a click if your brand is recommended or cited in answers.
• Accuracy becomes an SEO KPI: it’s not enough to be present; the answer must reflect your positioning correctly (category, audience, differentiation, constraints).
• Consistency becomes a growth lever: brand facts must match across your site and across third-party sources to reduce misrepresentation.
• Iteration becomes the work: AEO is a monitoring-and-improvement loop, not a one-time content project.

Operator takeaway: your SEO program needs a new workstream: “answer visibility” (mentions, citations, share of voice, accuracy) with clear owners and a weekly shipping rhythm.

What to do first: build an AEO baseline you can manage

The fastest way to make AEO real inside a business is to define what you’re actually measuring. Start with a small, stable set of prompts that map to pipeline intent.

Build an “answer set” of 30–50 prompts across:

• Category: “What is [category]?”, “How does [category] work?”
• Best tools: “Best [category] tools”, “Best [category] for [use case]”
• Comparisons: “[your category] vs [adjacent category]”, “[competitor] alternatives”
• Evaluation: “How to choose a [category] tool”, “What features matter in [category]?”
• Implementation: “How to implement [category]”, “Common [category] mistakes”
• ROI/pricing: “Is [category] worth it?”, “How to calculate ROI for [category]”

Then score each prompt weekly using four fields that leadership will understand:

• Mention: does your brand appear? (yes/no)
• Citation: is your domain cited? (yes/no + cited URL)
• Share of voice: how often are you included vs competitors across the set?
• Accuracy: is the description correct? (simple 1–3 scale works)

Once you can baseline this, you can prioritize work based on gaps instead of opinions.

The citable content standard

Classic SEO optimizes for “rankable.” AEO optimizes for citable.

Citable content is easy to extract, specific enough to quote, and consistent enough to paraphrase safely. Use this standard for your priority “answer pages” (category pages, comparisons, integrations, product pages, and high-intent guides):

• Lead with a direct answer: define the term, state the recommendation, or summarize the approach in the first 5–10 lines.
• Write for extraction: short paragraphs, explicit lists, and clear sectioning that can be lifted into a snippet.
• Use decision rules: “Use X when…”, “Avoid X if…”, “Choose A over B when…”
• Be concrete: include steps, thresholds, examples, and “what good looks like” checklists.
• Anchor claims to proof: cite methodology, constraints, and real examples to reduce wrong paraphrases.
• Standardize entities: product names, feature names, category definitions, and acronyms must not drift page to page.

Internal test: can someone copy three short excerpts from the page that still make sense out of context? If not, you’re not citation-ready.

Where Clavius helps: brand mention tracking shows which prompts include (or exclude) you, and competitor tracking highlights which brands are becoming the default citations.

The technical baseline: make your pages easy to crawl, parse, and trust

AEO performance is capped by technical friction. If answer engines can’t reliably crawl or interpret the page, you’ll struggle to earn citations even with strong content.

Prioritize four technical baselines on your citation candidates:

• Indexation and canonical clarity: ensure your highest-value answer pages are indexable, canonicalized correctly, and not diluted across parameter variants.
• Internal linking that points to truth: link to your “definition” and “comparison” pages from authoritative hubs with descriptive anchors.
• Structured data hygiene: implement schema that genuinely matches the page and fix errors. Broken markup is a silent credibility tax.
• Rendering and performance stability: the primary answer content should not depend on brittle client-side rendering or be hidden behind interaction.

Common failure pattern: teams publish AEO content in a poorly linked blog corner, with inconsistent terminology and unsupported structured data. The fix is usually not more pages. The fix is making existing pages discoverable and legible to machines.

Where Clavius helps: structured data issue detection can surface markup problems at scale, and analytics/automation help correlate fixes with changes in mention coverage.

Authority signals beyond your site

Answer engines triangulate from the broader web. If third-party sources contradict your positioning, or if you lack credible confirmations, competitors can dominate answers even when your on-site pages are strong.

Build an authority layer alongside content:

• Entity consistency: align brand descriptions, product naming, leadership bios, and core claims across your site and major third-party profiles.
• Third-party validation: earn proof in places buyers and machines trust (partner directories, review platforms, credible publications, customer case studies).
• Comparison presence: appear in “alternatives,” “best tools,” and comparison ecosystems with accurate, up-to-date facts.
• Freshness discipline: refresh key proof points on a schedule so your “truth surface” stays current.

Where Clavius helps: competitor tracking shows where competitors are being cited and where your presence is missing, so authority-building becomes targeted instead of random outreach.

A 7-day AEO sprint for Heads of SEO

This sprint produces fast signal without pretending AEO is solved in a week. The goal is to establish a baseline, remove obvious blockers, and ship a small set of high-leverage improvements.

1. Day 1: Define your answer set. Pick 30–50 prompts mapped to category, evaluation, and conversion intent.
2. Day 2: Benchmark visibility. Record mention rate, citation rate, share of voice, and an accuracy score.
3. Day 3: Select 10 citation candidates. Choose pages most likely to be cited and note gaps (missing direct answers, weak structure, thin proof, drifting entities).
4. Day 4: Fix technical blockers. Resolve indexation/canonical issues, improve internal linking, and fix structured data errors on those pages.
5. Day 5: Upgrade two pages to citation-ready. Add a direct answer at the top, tighten structure, add decision rules and examples, and standardize terminology.
6. Day 6: Publish one missing intent page. Create a high-intent page you lack (comparison, alternatives, “best for use case,” integration).
7. Day 7: Re-measure and backlog. Re-check the same prompts, log outcomes, and build a prioritized backlog tied to gaps.

Note on tooling: AEO breaks manual tracking. Once you’re monitoring dozens of prompts across brands and competitors, you need automated mention/citation tracking and a way to connect content and technical work to outcomes.

Where Clavius fits: brand mention tracking, competitor tracking, structured data issue detection, AI bot detection, analytics, and automation to turn AEO into a measurable workflow.

Checklist:

• Define a 30–50 prompt answer set mapped to funnel intent.
• Baseline mention rate, citation rate, share of voice, and accuracy weekly.
• Identify 10 citation candidate pages (category, comparison, integrations, core guides).
• Fix indexation, canonicalization, and internal linking to those pages.
• Validate and repair structured data on citation candidates.
• Upgrade pages to be citable: direct answers, lists, decision rules, examples.
• Standardize entities and terminology across priority pages.
• Build third-party confirmation in trusted ecosystems (partners, reviews, publications).
• Ship weekly improvements tied to measured gaps.
• Automate monitoring as soon as manual checks become a bottleneck.

FAQs

I’m Head of SEO. How does AEO affect me? It expands your remit from rankings and clicks to answer visibility: whether your brand is mentioned, cited, and described accurately in AI-generated answers that influence shortlists.

Is AEO replacing SEO? No. AEO rewards the same fundamentals as SEO, but requires higher clarity, stronger consistency, and better structure so your pages can be safely extracted and cited.

What should I measure for AEO? Track brand mention rate, citation rate, share of voice versus competitors, and an accuracy score for how your brand and positioning are described.

What content is most likely to be cited? Pages that lead with a direct answer, use scannable structure, include decision rules and examples, and keep entity naming consistent across the site.

Do technical SEO fixes matter for AEO? Yes. Indexation, canonical clarity, internal linking, rendering stability, and structured data hygiene are common prerequisites for citations.

How do I compete if competitors are mentioned more? Identify the specific prompts where they dominate, upgrade your closest citation candidates first, then publish the missing high-intent pages (comparisons, alternatives, “best for” use cases, integrations).

Run a Clavius visibility audit to benchmark your brand mentions, competitor share of voice, and the URLs most likely to earn citations—then turn the findings into a weekly AEO backlog your team can ship against.