About Learn AEO
A course in answer engine optimization
Learn AEO teaches marketers who already know SEO how AI answer engines pick their sources, and what to change so your pages are among them.
What the course is
Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews a question and you get an answer the engine has written, with a few sources, instead of a list of links. Getting cited in those answers takes some of what you already do for search, and some things you probably don’t do yet.
The course is laid out as a City of Answers with 8 districts, one lesson each. You start at The Gate, where you see how an answer gets built, and work through crawling, writing, structured data, authority, the individual platforms and measurement, to The Citadel, where you plan an AEO program of your own.
3 of the 8 lessons are live now: How answer engines choose sources, Make your site reachable by AI, Writing citable content. The rest are coming soon. Lesson 1 is free once you sign in.
How the lessons are sourced
Each concept in a lesson ends with its sources, linked to the original page, with the date it was published or last updated, or the date we last checked it. Sources in the live lessons include Google Search Central, OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Microsoft Bing, the IETF's robots.txt standard (RFC 9309), and research papers on arXiv.
When a vendor documents how its own crawler or answer engine behaves, that is the source we use.
Spotted something out of date or wrong? Tell us and we will check it against the source.
How we teach
Sourced
Every concept lists where it comes from, and the source is the vendor's own documentation wherever one exists. If a claim cannot be traced to a page you can open, it is not in the lesson.
Hands-on
You do not just read about robots.txt or passage structure. Each lesson has checks as you go, hands-on exercises, and an audit at the end.
Honest about the unknowns
Answer engines change quickly and their makers say only so much. Where the documentation hedges, the lesson says so rather than filling the gap with guesses.