If you've ever searched your own product and seen a competitor recommended by an AI assistant instead, you already understand why AEO matters. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of making your site legible, trustworthy, and citable to AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Deepseek. It's not magic. It's mostly technical and structural decisions you can either get right or leave broken. The frustrating part? A lot of what blocks AI citations is stuff you'd fix anyway for good engineering reasons: server-rendered HTML, clean redirects, structured data. The difference is that with AI answer engines, the signal patterns are tighter and the feedback loop is longer. Why This Matters More for Builders Than Marketers Most AEO content is written for marketing teams. But if you're building a dev tool, SaaS platform, or data product, you're often the one with deploy access and the one who can actually fix this.…