Field Notes
Long-form notes from a St. Louis Rails developer doing AEO for local businesses outside business hours. Pillar pieces on schema, robots.txt, llms.txt, Google Business Profile, and the answer-engine citation game.
AI answer engines have their own crawlers. ChatGPT uses GPTBot. Claude uses ClaudeBot. Perplexity uses PerplexityBot. Each has its own rules. Here are drop-in robots.txt and llms.txt files that welcome the verified crawlers, plus the citations to vendor docs that prove each line is real.
Read more →Answer Engine Optimization is structuring a site so generative AI tools cite it as a source. SEO targets the ten blue links; AEO targets being the quoted answer. Tactics overlap; goals differ. Here's the working playbook from a St. Louis Rails developer running AEO for local business.
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