Playbook · AEO
How to optimise a page for answer engines
Ranking gets you into the list. Being liftable gets you into the answer. These are the checks that decide which.
Short answer
To optimise for answer engines, put a complete answer to one question in the first 150 words of the page, phrase the heading above it as the question a person would actually type, and mark the pairing up with FAQPage or HowTo schema. Everything else on this page is a refinement of those three moves.
The checks, in order of consequence
- 01
Answer in the first 150 words
Put a self-contained answer near the top — one that still makes sense when it is cut out of the page and pasted somewhere else. No preamble, no throat-clearing, no "in this article we will explore".
This is the single check most pages fail. An answer that needs the paragraph above it to make sense cannot be lifted.
- 02
One question per heading
Write the H2 as the question, in the words a customer uses, not the words the industry uses. "How much does SEO cost in Israel?" beats "Pricing considerations".
- 03
Answer immediately under the heading
The sentence directly after the heading should answer it. Context, caveats and detail come after — an engine reads the pairing, not the whole section.
- 04
Keep answers 40–60 words
Long enough to be complete, short enough to be quoted whole. Anything past about 60 words gets truncated somewhere you did not choose.
- 05
FAQPage or HowTo schema
Mark the question/answer pairs explicitly. Schema keeps a Q&A pair together when a page is split into chunks for retrieval, so the answer never gets separated from its question.
This is why schema matters more for AEO than for classic SEO: it survives chunking.
- 06
Use tables for anything comparative
Prices, tiers, comparisons, specs. A table gets extracted far more reliably than the same facts written as sentences.
- 07
Put the entity in plain text
Name the thing you are talking about — the company, the product, the person — in text, not only in an image or a logo. Answer engines resolve entities from text.
- 08
Keep it current, and say so
Publish and update dates in visible text and in schema. Freshness weighs heavily for commercial and evaluation queries, where a stale page is quietly dropped.
- 09
One page, one job
A page trying to answer six questions answers none of them cleanly. Split it, and let each page own one query shape.
- 10
Cover the follow-ups
Whatever a reader would ask next belongs on the page as its own heading. That is what People Also Ask is built from.
- 11
Let the crawlers in
Check robots.txt actually allows the answer engines you want to appear in. A blocked crawler makes every other check on this list irrelevant.
Why this is a separate discipline
Classic SEO optimises for a position in a list. The page has to be relevant and trusted enough to rank; how it is written internally barely matters. AEO adds a second requirement: the page must also be shaped so a complete answer can be taken out of it without the rest of the page coming along.
That is why a page can rank third and still lose the answer box to a page ranking seventh. The seventh page had one paragraph that could be lifted whole. Position and liftability are different properties, and only one of them is what you were optimising.
The failure mode to watch for
The most common version is a genuinely good page whose answer is spread over three paragraphs, each of which depends on the one before it. Nothing is wrong with the content. It simply cannot be excerpted, so it never is. The fix is not to write less — it is to front-load one self-contained answer and then continue at whatever length the subject deserves.
If you want to see which of these a specific page passes, the free SEO check reports the mechanical ones — headings, schema, canonical, structured data — and grades what it finds.
Questions people ask about this
Does AEO replace SEO?
No. You cannot be lifted from a page an engine never retrieved, and retrieval is still ranking. AEO is a layer on top: rank first, then make the answer extractable.
Is FAQ schema still worth adding if Google shows fewer FAQ rich results?
Yes, for a different reason than it was originally added. The rich result was always a bonus; the durable value is that the markup holds a question and its answer together when a page is chunked for retrieval.
How long should the answer paragraph be?
Roughly 40 to 60 words. Long enough to answer completely, short enough that an engine quotes it whole rather than cutting it at a point you did not choose.
Can I just add an FAQ section to every page?
Only if the questions are ones people actually ask and the answers are real. A bolted-on FAQ that restates the page adds nothing an engine wants to quote, and it dilutes what the page is about.
Want this run against your own site?
Send the URL and I'll come back with which of these checks the site passes today, and which one is costing you the most.