Reference Library  ·  Updated Monthly

Guides for the AI-readable web

Long-form, citation-heavy, no fluff. Everything we know about making your brand legible to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity — taught the way we wish someone had taught us.

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AEO 101
The Complete Guide

Updated April 2026 18 min read v3.2

The definitive reference for Answer Engine Optimization

If you read one thing on this site, read this. Eight chapters covering what AEO is, why it isn't SEO, how AI models actually read your pages, and the eleven specific things to ship this quarter.

Table of contents
01What AEO actually is (and isn't)
02Why it differs from classical SEO
03How AI models actually read your pages
04llms.txt explained, with examples
05JSON-LD essentials & common mistakes
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AEO Basics

8 guides

Foundational concepts. Start here if you've never optimized for answer engines before.

AEO Basics

The 9-point AEO checklist

The exact audit we run on every free scan. Print it, run it, ship the fixes.

6 min Beginner Updated Apr 30
AEO Basics

AEO vs SEO: a side-by-side comparison

Forty-two differences, ranked by how much they actually matter. Most "experts" focus on the wrong fifteen.

9 min Beginner Apr 22
AEO Basics

Why AI models can't read your homepage

The five rendering pitfalls — client-side JS, lazy hydration, hidden text — that hide your content from models.

11 min Intermediate Apr 15

Schema & JSON-LD

11 guides

The structured data that makes your facts machine-readable. Heavy on copy-paste-able code.

Schema

JSON-LD for SaaS: the Organization type

The single most important schema you'll ship. Get this right and AI models stop confabulating your founding year.

8 min Intermediate Apr 28
Schema

Product schema, done right

Pricing, SKUs, availability. The four fields models always check, and the eight they ignore.

12 min Intermediate Apr 19
Schema

FAQPage and how-to schema audit

Models love structured Q&A. They hate when you mark up content they can't find on the page. Here's the diff.

7 min Beginner Apr 12
Schema

Validation tooling: rich-results tester vs schema.org

Three free validators, ranked. One is wrong about half the time. Worth knowing which.

5 min Intermediate Apr 5
Schema

The pricing-page anti-patterns

"Contact us" pricing is the #1 reason ChatGPT can't answer "what does X cost". Here's what to do instead.

10 min Intermediate Mar 30
Schema

Schema for multi-brand companies

Disney has ten brands. Each needs its own Organization schema. Here's the hierarchy that actually works.

14 min Advanced Mar 24

llms.txt

6 guides

The new robots.txt for AI crawlers. Less mature, more impactful — for now.

llms.txt

The complete llms.txt spec, explained

What goes in, what doesn't, and what the spec gets wrong. Includes a copy-paste template for SaaS.

12 min Intermediate Apr 26
llms.txt

Generating llms.txt from your docs

The five-line script that turns any markdown docs site into a model-readable manifest. Open source.

6 min Intermediate Apr 18
llms.txt

llms-full.txt: when to ship it, when to skip it

The full-content variant is overkill for most. Here are the three situations where it's worth the file size.

5 min Advanced Apr 9

Model Coverage

9 guides

Model-specific quirks. What ChatGPT cares about that Gemini doesn't, and vice versa.

Model Coverage

ChatGPT (GPT-4o) source preferences

Which domains GPT-4o trusts, which it ignores, and how to get on the "trusted" list without paying anyone.

11 min Intermediate Apr 24
Model Coverage

Gemini and the Google knowledge graph

Gemini's grounding is unique. Here's how to feed the knowledge graph directly via Wikidata and Google Business Profile.

13 min Intermediate Apr 17
Model Coverage

Perplexity: optimizing for cited answers

Perplexity is the easiest model to influence — and the most public about it. Here's the citation playbook.

9 min Intermediate Apr 11