SEO SOP: Get Cited by ChatGPT with Answer Engine Optimization

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the play Richard Hickman of Piqued Consulting laid out on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast: build your site so an AI cites you, not just so a human finds you. This SOP turns that into a repeatable procedure your team can run this week.

Objective

Build a set of web pages that answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude — surface and cite when a prospect asks about your category, so the AI recommends you by name instead of skipping over a thin site or inventing an answer.

Key Steps

1. Harvest the exact questions prospects ask. List the real, verbatim questions people type into ChatGPT or ask on sales and support calls (e.g. “how do I grow my coaching business?”). Pull them from call notes, your inbox, and by asking the AI itself what people ask about your niche. These become your page titles.
2. Do the traditional SEO foundations first. AEO sits on top of SEO, it doesn’t replace it. Make sure the site is crawlable, fast, and structured the way it needs to be to rank organically before you optimize for the machines — “you’ve got to do all the traditional SEO stuff,” then build for the AI reader on top.
3. Publish one page per question, titled as the exact question. Write a blog post or page whose title is the precise question the prospect asked. When the model goes searching for that thing, it finds a whole article answering that exact question and is far more likely to pull and cite it.
4. Answer directly, up top, then go deep. Lead with a clear, self-contained answer in the first paragraph (the part a model can lift), then follow with the depth, examples, and your specific point of view. Write for the AI reader as well as the human — “who reads blogs anymore? AIs do.”
5. Make the page machine-readable. Use natural-language FAQ structure, clear headings, and structured data so an answer engine can parse the question→answer relationship cleanly. (inferred execution detail consistent with Richard’s “build it for the AI visiting it” point.)
6. Give every page a clear call to action. Don’t send AI-referred readers to a bare homepage and hope. Each answer page should reference your material and push to a single obvious next step (book a call, download the guide) so the visibility turns into an actual lead.
7. Test whether AI actually cites you — and re-check. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude your target questions and see if you’re referenced. Richard built a free tool (coachingaiaudit.com) that does exactly this; agencies doing it across a client roster can monitor AI visibility at scale. Where you’re absent, fix the page and test again.

Cautionary Notes

• Skipping the SEO fundamentals — AEO is additive; a page that can’t be crawled or ranked won’t get cited either.
• Thin, all-about-me pages — “five pictures of yourself” gives the LLM nothing, so it ignores you or makes something up.
• Citation is a black box — the same query can cite different sources; treat it as a durable content investment, not a one-time hack.
• No follow-up system — AI visibility that lands on a homepage with no CTA and no lead capture produces traffic, not revenue.

Tips for Efficiency

• Mine the AI itself: ask ChatGPT “what questions do people ask about ?” to seed your page-title list fast.
• One question = one page. Resist bundling; the tighter the match to the asked question, the better the citation odds.
• Repurpose the answer into your email and social so the same content nurtures owned channels too (jab-jab-jab-hook).
• Re-run your citation check monthly — answer engines change what they surface, so treat it like rank tracking.

Sources & Relevant Episodes

Richard Hickman, Piqued Consulting — framed the shift as writing your website “not necessarily geared towards a human being visiting it, but an AI visiting it,” and titling blog posts as the exact questions prospects ask ChatGPT. Hear it in the full interview: Build Your Website for the AI, Not the Human on Unscripted Small Business.