What AEO is, and how it differs from SEO

Answers instead of links

For most of the web's history, search meant a page of links, and SEO meant getting near the top of it. That still matters.

More people now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Mode a question and get a written answer with a few sources attached. Answer engine optimisation, or AEO, is the work of becoming one of those sources. The crawlers these systems use have to be able to read your pages, and what they read has to be clear enough to quote. Some people call it GEO, generative engine optimisation. It is the same idea.

What is known about how assistants pick sources

Not much, officially. None of the big assistants publishes a ranking formula, and a lot of AEO advice is SEO advice with a new label on it. A few things are reasonably solid:

• An assistant can only use a page its crawler may fetch. OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot are not shown in ChatGPT search answers.
• Crawlers do different jobs. GPTBot collects training data for OpenAI's models, and blocking it does not take you out of ChatGPT search. ChatGPT-User fetches a single page because a user asked about it.
• Google's AI Overviews draw on Google's own index, so a page that is not indexed in Google is not in the running. Ordinary SEO decides that part.
• A plain, specific statement is easier to quote than a hedged one. "Check-in from 14:00, check-out by 11:00" can go straight into an answer. "We try to be flexible" cannot.

What AEO work looks like

1. Let the right crawlers in. Check robots.txt for the crawlers that feed answers, such as OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. Decide separately about training, which GPTBot and Google-Extended control.
2. Answer questions in plain text. Use headings that match what people ask, and put the answer in the first sentence under each one.
3. Publish structured data. Organization or LocalBusiness with complete, accurate details, Article on articles, FAQPage where a page really is questions and answers. No assistant has said it rewards markup. Treat it as a way to remove ambiguity, not as a ranking factor.
4. Keep your facts the same everywhere. Name, address, hours and prices should match across your site, your Google Business Profile and the directories that list you. An assistant that finds two phone numbers has to pick one.
5. Get mentioned elsewhere. Being named in the press, in reviews and on industry lists probably matters here as much as it does in SEO. No plugin does this part for you.
6. Tell search engines when pages change. A sitemap with honest lastmod dates helps crawlers find new and changed pages. IndexNow tells the engines that support it, such as Bing and Yandex, straight away. Google does not take part in IndexNow.
7. Consider llms.txt, with low expectations. It is a proposed file that gives language models a short map of your site. Support is patchy, and Google has said it does not use it. It costs little to publish.

AEO and SEO

Most of the work overlaps. Pages a crawler can fetch, content that answers the question, accurate structured data and a good reputation elsewhere help with both. The difference is in emphasis. AEO pays more attention to which AI crawlers you let in, and to whether a paragraph still makes sense when it is quoted on its own.

You will find tables that score each signal for SEO and AEO. Nobody has published measurements that would support those scores, so I would not plan around them.

Where AI Boost for Joomla fits

AI Boost for Joomla covers the technical items on that list for a Joomla site. Every output is off after install, and you switch on the ones you want.

• Schema.org JSON-LD for your business, as one of 36 site types, and for pages, breadcrumbs, articles, authors and events
• FAQPage markup from question headings on your pages, with "Auto-Detect FAQ from Content", and, with the YOOtheme extension, from a YOOtheme accordion whose every title is a question
• /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt, built on each request, and Markdown copies of articles, categories and tag pages for AI agents
• A marked block at the end of robots.txt that allows or blocks each of 25 AI crawlers and 12 crawlers from SEO tools, leaving your own lines alone
• An XML sitemap, and IndexNow pings when you save or publish an article

It does not write your content, earn you mentions or keep your Business Profile up to date, and it cannot make an assistant cite you. It gives the crawlers a site they can read. Being worth quoting is still your part.