Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Also: AEO
Optimizing so AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews) cite your product, not just so Google ranks it.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is SEO's successor for a world where people ask an AI instead of scrolling ten blue links. The goal shifts from "rank #1" to "be the source the model cites when it answers." AI-referral traffic has grown nearly eightfold in two years, so this is a fast-rising channel, not a someday.
Practically, AEO means: clean server-rendered HTML that bots can read without running JavaScript; structured data (schema.org) so machines understand your content; an llms.txt file describing your site to LLM crawlers; and — increasingly — being reachable as an MCP server so agents can query you live.
It's also where the gap is widest: many directories that dominate classic SEO expose none of this. Stork serves llms.txt and llms-full.txt and runs a live MCP server — the things that make a listing legible to the agents, not just to humans.