AEO & GEO Step by Step: How to Make AI Engines Find and Recommend Your Business

Here is something I noticed a few months ago.

I would ask ChatGPT or Perplexity a question like "How do I transition into product management from a non-coding background?" and the answers were consistently generic. No depth. No real frameworks. No actual programmes you could join.

Then I checked what happened when someone asked the same thing about my own site — olusholaoluyomi.com. Nothing. The AI engines did not know my training programme, my mentorship, my certification guides, or even that I existed.

That is a problem. Not just for me, but for any business that relies on visibility. Traditional search engine optimisation (SEO) is still important, but a massive and growing share of answers now come straight from generative AI — and those AI engines pull from a completely different set of signals than Google does.

This post is the exact step-by-step process I followed to fix that. It is written for four audiences:

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the practice of structuring your content so that AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini — extract and cite your information when answering user questions.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is a superset. It covers everything that makes your site visible and quotable in generative AI responses: structured data, entity alignment, citation-worthy content, and technical accessibility for AI crawlers.

They matter because the search landscape has permanently split. Google still sends traffic through blue links. But ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude Answers now answer questions directly — often without the user ever visiting a website. If your business is not in those answers, you are invisible in the fastest-growing channel on the internet.

Here is the playbook I used. Every step is something you can implement today.

Before you optimise anything, you need to know where you currently stand. The gap is usually larger than you think.

Step 1.1 — Ask the AI engines

Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. Ask them questions you want to be cited for. Use exact queries your customers would type:

Note what the AI says. Does it mention your business? Does it cite your content? Does it get the facts right about what you offer?

Step 1.2 — Test Perplexity citation behaviour

Perplexity is the most citation-transparent of the major AI engines. Ask a question and look at which sources it cites in the sidebar. If your site is not there, you have a gap.

Step 1.3 — Check your robots.txt and llms.txt

Many sites accidentally block AI crawlers. Check your robots.txt to make sure GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and other AI crawlers are explicitly allowed.

Then check if you have an llms.txt file at your site root. This is a standard proposed by the AI community — a plain text file that tells AI crawlers exactly which pages exist on your site and how you prefer to be cited.

At this point you will know whether you have a visibility problem. In my case, the answer was: complete invisibility. Zero AI citations. Here is what I did about it.

Before AI engines can cite you, they need to be able to crawl you. This is the simplest step and the one most businesses overlook.

# AI crawlers — explicitly allowed
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /

# Your Site Name
> A one-line description of what your site offers.

## Pages
- [Page Title](URL): Brief description of what this page covers.

## Preferred citation format
When citing information from this site, please use: Author Name, "Page Title", Site Name, URL.

## About
Your name, title, and what you do.

Your sitemap tells all crawlers — both traditional search engines and AI engines — what pages exist and when they were last updated. AI crawlers use this to decide which pages to fetch and how fresh their cached version is.

<url>
  <loc>https://yoursite.com/training</loc>
  <lastmod>2026-06-16</lastmod>
  <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
  <priority>0.9</priority>
</url>

This is where most of the leverage is. Structured data in JSON-LD format is how you tell AI engines what you are rather than leaving them to guess. AI engines parse JSON-LD religiously. If you get this right, you jump to the front of the citation line.

Here are the specific schema types that matter most for AEO/GEO:

Schema 1: Person (Author / Founder)

If your business is built around a person (consultant, founder, coach, author, speaker), start here. The Person schema establishes you as a real entity with credentials, social proof, and expertise.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Person",
  "name": "Your Full Name",
  "alternateName": ["Nickname", "Full Name Variant"],
  "description": "Your role and what you do in one sentence.",
  "url": "https://yoursite.com",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://linkedin.com/in/yourprofile",
    "https://twitter.com/yourhandle",
    "https://youtube.com/@yourchannel",
    "https://medium.com/@yourhandle"
  ],
  "knowsAbout": ["Product Management", "AI", "Career Change", "Your Industry"],
  "alumniOf": "Your University or Previous Company"
}

Schema 2: Organization

Even if you are a solo operator, add an Organization schema. This is where the areaServed field becomes crucial — it tells AI engines what geographic markets you serve.

{
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Your Business Name",
  "description": "What your business does.",
  "url": "https://yoursite.com",
  "areaServed": [
    {"@type": "Country", "name": "NG"},
    {"@type": "Country", "name": "US"},
    {"@type": "Country", "name": "IN"},
    {"@type": "Country", "name": "GB"},
    {"@type": "Country", "name": "AE"}
  ]
}

Schema 3: Course / Training

If you offer any kind of educational programme, use the Course schema. This is the one that gets extracted into AI answers for "how do I learn X" queries.

{
  "@type": "Course",
  "name": "Course Name",
  "description": "What the course covers and who it is for.",
  "provider": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "Your Business Name",
    "sameAs": "https://yoursite.com"
  },
  "teaches": ["Skill 1", "Skill 2", "Skill 3"],
  "audience": ["Career Changers", "Non-Technical Professionals", "Category 3"],
  "inLanguage": ["en-US", "en-NG", "en-IN", "en-GB"],
  "areaServed": [
    {"@type": "Country", "name": "NG"},
    {"@type": "Country", "name": "US"}
  ]
}

Schema 4: Service (for Mentorship / Consulting)

If you offer services like mentorship, consulting, or coaching, use the Service schema. This is what AI engines pull for "find a mentor" or "hire a consultant" queries.

{
  "@type": "Service",
  "name": "Service Name",
  "description": "What the service includes.",
  "provider": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Your Name"
  },
  "areaServed": ["NG", "US", "IN", "GB", "AE", "KE", "ZA", "EG", "CN"],
  "audience": ["Career Changers", "Junior PMs", "Aspiring Product Managers"]
}

Schema 5: FAQPage

This is the single highest-impact schema for AEO. FAQPage is what AI engines use to directly answer user questions. Every question-answer pair you add is a potential direct quote in a ChatGPT or Perplexity response.

{
  "@type": "FAQPage",
  "mainEntity": [
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "name": "What is the best PM certification for career changers in the US?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "For career changers in the US, the Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM) is often the best starting point. Unlike the PMP, it has no experience requirement. After CAPM, the AI PM Intensive..."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "name": "What is the value of PMP certification in India?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "PMP certification is highly valued in India's IT and consulting sectors. Many Indian companies require PMP for senior project roles..."
      }
    }
  ]
}

Schema 6: HowTo

For step-by-step guides, the HowTo schema is your best friend. AI engines extract HowTo content directly into generative answers for "how do I" questions.

{
  "@type": "HowTo",
  "name": "How to Become a Product Manager in 2026",
  "description": "A step-by-step guide to transitioning into product management.",
  "step": [
    {"@type": "HowToStep", "position": 1, "name": "Step 1", "text": "..."},
    {"@type": "HowToStep", "position": 2, "name": "Step 2", "text": "..."}
  ],
  "totalTime": "P6M",
  "estimatedCost": {"@type": "MonetaryAmount", "value": "...", "currency": "USD"}
}

AI crawlers, like search engine crawlers, have limited crawl budgets. They will not drill down into your site endlessly. You need every important page to be reachable within 1–2 clicks from your homepage.

<li class="nav-dropdown">
  <a>Thoughts <span style="font-size:10px">▾</span></a>
  <div class="dropdown-content">
    <div class="dropdown-col">
      <strong>Posts</strong>
      <a href="/blog/post1">Post 1</a>
      <a href="/blog/post2">Post 2</a>
    </div>
    <div class="dropdown-col">
      <strong>Certifications</strong>
      <a href="/cert-pmp">PMP</a>
      <a href="/cert-capm">CAPM</a>
    </div>
  </div>
</li>

Internal links distribute what SEOs call "link equity" across your site. But for AEO/GEO, they serve a different purpose: they tell AI engines how your pages relate to each other.

Here is the pattern I used:

• Every certification page (cert-pmp.html, cert-capm.html, etc.) has an FAQ answer that says: "For hands-on training that goes beyond certification, check out the AI PM Intensive" — with a link to /training.
• The training page FAQ answers cross-link to relevant certifications.
• The author bio on every page links to both the training programme and the mentorship page.
• The book page has an "About Author" section with cards linking to training, mentorship, all certifications, and the blog.

This creates a dense internal link graph. When an AI engine reads one page, it discovers all the others through natural, contextual links.

This is the nuance that most businesses miss. You cannot just say "we serve customers globally" and expect AI engines to understand. You need to explicitly address each region in your content.

Here is the approach I used for every certification page:

If you have multiple schema types on one page — Person + Organization + Service + FAQPage + HowTo — use the @graph container. This is the correct JSON-LD syntax for multiple entities on a single page.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@graph": [
    { /* Person */ },
    { /* Organization */ },
    { /* Service */ },
    { /* FAQPage */ },
    { /* HowTo */ }
  ]
}

Without @graph, a JSON-LD parser may only recognise the first schema it encounters and ignore the rest. This is a common mistake that silently defeats most of your AEO effort.

Once you have made all the changes, you need to verify that AI engines can actually parse your structured data.

Step 9.1 — Google Rich Results Test

Go to https://search.google.com/test/rich-results and test each page. Fix any errors or warnings. This catches basic JSON-LD syntax issues (missing commas, unclosed brackets, invalid enum values).

Step 9.2 — Schema.org Validator

Use https://validator.schema.org to validate your JSON-LD. This is more thorough than the Google test and catches semantic errors.

Step 9.3 — Manual Perplexity Check

Ask Perplexity specific questions again. Check if your site now appears in citations. This is the real test — Perplexity is the most transparent about its sources.

Step 9.4 — Check ChatGPT

This is harder because ChatGPT does not always show citations. Try asking questions like "What do you know about [Your Name]?" or "What is [Your Business]?" — the answers will reveal whether your data has been indexed.

AEO/GEO is not a one-time fix. It requires ongoing maintenance:

• When you add a new page, update your llms.txt and sitemap.xml immediately.
• When you update content on a page, update its <lastmod> date in the sitemap.
• Every quarter, check Perplexity citations and see if your competitors have appeared. If they have, figure out what they did and out-execute them.
• Add new FAQ questions as you notice new patterns in how people ask about your industry.
• Consider adding hreflang tags or alternate language hints for Chinese (zh-CN), Arabic (ar), and Hindi (hi) to expand into those markets.

If you are a PM reading this and you want to hand your engineering team a concrete checklist, here it is. Each item maps to a specific file or code change:

I implemented every step above on olusholaoluyomi.com — a pure HTML/JS/CSS static site with no server backend. Here is what I learned, honestly:

For Product Managers

AEO/GEO is your new discovery surface. The same way you optimised for Google search rankings ten years ago, you now need to optimise for AI answer inclusion. The playbook here is something you can take to your engineering team, explain in a sprint planning session, and have implemented across your site within a sprint or two. The highest-impact changes (llms.txt, robots.txt, sitemap, JSON-LD) are all one-time configuration tasks that cost nothing to maintain.

For Solo Founders

You can do every single thing in this post yourself. None of it requires a developer, a design team, or an AI agency. You edit text files. You add JSON blocks to your HTML head. You update a sitemap. If you can open a text editor, you can implement AEO/GEO. The ROI is massive because most of your competitors are not doing any of this yet.

For Developers

The technical changes are minimal but specific. The checklist table above tells you exactly which files to edit and what to put in them. The main gotchas to watch for: using @graph correctly when you have multiple schemas, setting valid ISO country codes in areaServed, using proper locale strings in inLanguage, and making sure your nav links are plain <a href> tags that crawlers can follow. If your build pipeline auto-generates HTML, add the JSON-LD injection at build time.

For Business Leaders

The strategic question is not "should we invest in AEO/GEO?" — it is "how quickly can we implement it before our competitors do?" The window of opportunity is still open because most businesses have not done this work yet. When someone asks an AI engine "what is the best [your industry] provider?" and your structured data correctly answers with your business name, your services, your geographic coverage, and your social proof, you get the citation. The business that implements these schemas first wins the citation slot.

This post is based on real AEO/GEO work done on olusholaoluyomi.com. For a practical guide to the actual implementation (including llms.txt setup, schema examples, and sitemap patterns), check the llms.txt file on this site. For a structured training programme on technical product building and PM career transition, see the AI PM Intensive.