I spent a month doing AEO for a tiny niche site. Most of the advice was wrong.
"Answer Engine Optimization" is the new gold rush: get your site cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. There is an entire cottage industry selling advice on how — add schema markup, publish more pages, buy a tool. I run a small bilingual Chinese-astrology calculator ( auspiceoracle.com ). It's about as niche and low-authority as a site gets, which makes it a decent lab rat:…
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is a rapidly growing field where websites aim to be cited by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. An entrepreneur running a niche bilingual Chinese-astrology calculator site, auspiceoracle.com, decided to test the AEO advice on this low-authority site. Despite the common recommendations, the site's schema markup did not improve its standing in AI overviews or other AI models.
The entrepreneur found that page volume was not a strong signal for AI visibility, as rankings depended more on brand prominence and composite factors. Instead of out-defining Wikipedia entries, the entrepreneur focused on mapping the gaps in existing encyclopedia articles and prioritized measurement. By submitting their pages to crawlers through Bing's IndexNow system, they received citations from AI models, proving the importance of getting training crawlers to notice their site.
The key lesson learned is that success in AEO requires understanding and leveraging the underlying mechanisms, rather than simply following popular advice.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
