What is AEO (AI Engine Optimization)?

SEO aimed to climb the Google rankings. AEO aims for citation and recommendation by AI agents. The overlap is substantial; the design principles are not.

The core of AEO is treating the machine-readable layer as a first-class citizen: /llms.txt, /llms-full.txt, /for-ai, /agents-data, /agents-policy, and the structured JSON at /api/*.

SOWTEN measures AI citation count as a KPI. Each month we query Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity and log SOWTEN mentions and URLs.