Introduction

What is Answer Engine Optimization?

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of making your website discoverable and citable by AI-powered answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and SearchGPT.

Unlike traditional SEO which focuses on search engine result pages (SERPs), AEO ensures your content is understood and referenced by Large Language Models (LLMs) when they generate answers.

Why aeo.js?

AI crawlers and LLMs look for specific files and formats that most websites don’t provide:

• llms.txt — A concise summary of your site written for LLMs
• llms-full.txt — Full content concatenated for deep ingestion
• ai-index.json — Structured content optimized for RAG pipelines
• docs.json — Documentation manifest for content discovery
• Raw Markdown — Per-page .md files for clean content extraction

aeo.js generates all of these automatically from your existing pages — no manual work required.

How it works

1. Install the package and add the plugin for your framework
2. Build your site as usual
3. aeo.js scans your output, extracts content, and generates all AEO files
4. The optional widget lets visitors toggle between human and AI views of your pages

Scope: what aeo.js does and doesn’t influence

AEO is the on-site half of being discoverable by AI engines — there’s an off-site half that aeo.js cannot reach. Setting expectations upfront so you can plan a full strategy:

What aeo.js does well

Improves machine-readable access to your own site:

• generates llms.txt, llms-full.txt, ai-index.json, raw markdown copies, JSON-LD schema, and a sitemap
• structures content so AI crawlers can fetch, parse, and quote it
• audits and scores your page-level citability so you know where to improve

What aeo.js cannot influence

Off-site signals that AI engines also weigh:

• third-party mentions and reviews of your product across the web
• inbound links and how reputable the linking domains are
• community discussions (Reddit, Hacker News, X, niche forums) and how often you’re cited there
• model training data — what an LLM “already knows” about you from its pre-training cutoff
• freshness signals outside your control (independent news, blog roundups, podcasts)

Think of aeo.js as a strong foundation — necessary but not sufficient. For full AEO coverage, pair it with the off-site work above: PR, community engagement, and being mentioned where your customers research.

Supported Frameworks

Framework	Import
Astro	aeo.js/astro
Next.js	aeo.js/next
Vite (React, Vue, Svelte)	aeo.js/vite
Nuxt	aeo.js/nuxt
Angular	aeo.js/angular
Webpack	aeo.js/webpack
Any (CLI)	npx aeo.js generate