Top 10 Tips for Answer Engine & LLM Optimization

1. Identify and Track Key Questions

The first step (always, for everything) is to determine what you’re actually aiming for. Which questions do you want to be the answer for?

A good strategy is to analyze your own and your competitors' paid search data to find the high-value terms. You can then use an LLM like ChatGPT to transform these keywords into questions people are likely to ask. Once you have this list, use an AEO tracking tool to monitor your performance and establish a baseline before making changes. These trackers function similarly to SEO keyword trackers but account for the variability in LLM responses by measuring metrics like share of voice across different platforms and question variations.

2. Focus on Increasing Citations (Off-Site Optimization)

As noted earlier, unlike traditional Google search where ranking first is the primary goal, in LLMs, the key is to be mentioned as many times as possible in the sources the model summarizes. The first answer provided by an LLM is often the one mentioned most frequently in its citations. This is a crucial difference from SEO and opens up opportunities for even early-stage companies to gain visibility quickly. Focus on getting mentioned across a variety of high-quality sources, including affiliate sites, blogs, videos, and user-generated content platforms.

3. Create High-Quality On-Site Content

Everything that works for traditional SEO also works for AEO, so creating high-quality landing pages for relevant topics is fundamental. However, for AEO, it's especially important to answer not just the main question, but also all potential follow-up questions and subtopics. The more comprehensively your page addresses a topic, the more likely it is to be used as a citation. In other words: nerd out!

Get specific and go niche— people are seeking the answers to questions that haven’t ever been included in rankings before because they were too specific for search engines, but LLMs were built for this kind of detailed information. So focus on creating content that adds something new to the conversation, rather than just rewriting what others have said.

4. Leverage Wikipedia and Reddit Authentically

You’ve probably heard that sources like Wikipedia and especially Reddit are highly trusted and frequently cited sources for LLMs. The most effective strategy is to engage authentically as a real user. With Wikipedia, follow the guidelines, build up an editing history on related content and topics, and stick to the facts. If you’re aiming to grow brand presence, Wikipedia can be a strong place to establish credibility.

Reddit is where you want to go for more direct connection with the audience, but there are ways to do it right and ways to do it wrong. Avoid spamming or using fake accounts, as the Reddit community is very effective at policing this kind of behavior, which will likely get your accounts banned and comments deleted. Instead, have real employees create accounts, state who they are and where they work, and provide genuinely useful information in relevant threads. Even a small number of high-quality, authentic comments can have a significant impact.

5. Create Video Content, Especially for Niche Topics

One of the most underrated places for connecting with audiences, despite years of proven success, is YouTube and Vimeo. And we’re now seeing that posting videos there can be very effective for AEO, too. If you’ve been hemming and hawing about video content, this is your sign to dive in.

This is a particularly powerful strategy for B2B companies or those in less "glamorous" niches. While there are countless videos on topics like food and travel, there are far fewer on specialized subjects like "AI-powered payment processing APIs". Creating videos for these specific, high-intent topics can be a major opportunity to become a primary citation where little competition exists.

6. Optimize Your Help Center

Your help center is a valuable but often overlooked asset for AEO. Customers frequently ask LLMs detailed follow-up questions about product features, use cases, and integrations— questions that are best answered by your support documentation. Keep your help center under your main domain (e.g., yoursite.com/help), improve internal article linking, and expand coverage to address the long tail of specific user questions raised in sales and support calls.

7. Run Rigorous Experiments with Control Groups

Best practices for SEO and AEO are correct in theory, but to find out what truly works for your business, you must run structured experiments.

Create a test group of questions to try to influence, and a control group you will not touch. Intervene on the test group by creating a YouTube video, adding Reddit comments, or getting an affiliate mention and then compare the performance of the test group against the control group to see if your strategy worked. Remember that reproducibility is key to confirming your results!

8. Focus on the "Long Tail" of Questions

We touched on this earlier, but it deserves its own spot: LLMs support much longer and more specific queries than traditional search engines.

The average prompt in a chat interface is about 25 words, compared to about 6 in Google search. This creates a much larger "long tail" of highly specific questions that may have never been searched for before. Answering these niche questions is a powerful strategy for improving your AEO results, especially for newer companies, as you can become the sole citation for a query that has never been answered before.

9. Build a Dedicated Team

Effective AEO requires a combination of skills. Your existing SEO team or agency can handle the on-site content and technical aspects, however, the off-site citation building—particularly creating YouTube videos and executing a Reddit strategy—may require different expertise. This might fall to a community manager, content specialist, or a versatile marketer who is skilled at creating different types of content and engaging with online communities.

10. Avoid Fully AI-Generated Content

Most people are already well-versed in how to use AI as a writing assistant. But while leveraging generative AI may be part of the future of content creation, relying on 100% automated, AI-generated content does not produce great content— and it does not work for ranking.

Search engines and LLMs are actively working to avoid a model collapse, where AI simply summarizes derivatives of its own output, which means the most important thing about building your brand reputation and credibility hasn’t changed: make valuable content. Focus on producing unique, high-quality content with original research and domain expertise, potentially using AI to assist the process.

The rise of Answer Engines and LLMs doesn’t spell the end of discoverability—it just changes the rules of the game. SEO is still your foundation, but AEO is the next frontier, and the businesses that learn to play in this space first will be the ones shaping the narrative, capturing attention, and redefining their competitive landscape. Don’t wait for certainty, because it won’t come. Start testing, start contributing, and start building your presence now, while the field is still in flux. The companies that move early won’t just be keeping up; they’ll be the ones everyone else is trying to catch.