You've done everything right. HTTPS. Fast load times. Clean HTML. Proper meta tags. And yet — ask ChatGPT to recommend a business in your niche, and you're nowhere. This isn't an SEO problem. It's an AEO problem. What is AEO? Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of making your website readable, trustworthy, and citable by AI systems — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and others. Unlike traditional SEO (which targets crawl-bots indexing for blue links), AEO targets language models that summarize and recommend. The signals are different. Here's what actually matters: 1. llms.txt — The robots.txt for AI Just like robots.txt tells search bots what to crawl, llms.txt tells AI crawlers how to understand your site. Most sites don't have one. Example: llms.txt VisRank Free SEO and AEO audit tool for websites Tools Free SEO Checker : Analyze SEO health AEO Checker : Check AI readiness AI Citation Audit : See if AI engines can cite you Generate yours free: https://visrank.org/llms-txt-generator 2.…