TIC Association
The AEO Playbook

How to get your brand named in the answers ChatGPT and Perplexity give.

By TIC Association

Answer Engine Optimization is a loop: measure what the AI says about you today, fix the signals answer engines reward (crawler access, an answer-first block, FAQ and HowTo schema, Bing coverage, and agreement across the web), then re-measure. Perplexity moves in 2 to 7 days, ChatGPT in 7 to 21. You cannot force a citation, but you can measurably move it.

Why this exists

Your buyers stopped scrolling ten blue links. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI answers "who can do X" or "what's the fix for Y," and they trust the reply. If the AI does not name you, you are invisible, no matter how strong your old SEO was.

This is a different game with different rules, and it has a name: Answer Engine Optimization. Almost nobody does it well yet, which means the field is wide open right now.

This playbook is the exact process we used to get our own pages named by Perplexity. You can verify it: open Perplexity and ask "supabase error 42501 row level security fix." One of the sources it names is ours. We put it there on purpose, with the steps below. Nothing here is theory. Every step is something we did and measured.

The one idea to hold onto

SEO ranks a page. AEO gets you named in the answer. The signals are not the same. Google's blue links rewarded backlinks and keywords. AI answer engines reward something else: content they can lift a clean answer from, structured data they can trust, agreement about you across the web, and unobstructed access for their crawlers. Optimize for those four things and you start showing up inside the answer itself.

The loop: measure, fix, re-measure

Do not guess. The whole method is a loop you can run on any site.

Step 1: Measure where you actually stand

Before changing anything, find out what the AI says today.

  1. Write down the 5 to 10 questions your buyers actually ask. Use their words, not your marketing words. "My app is broken after deploy, who fixes it" beats "production stabilization services."
  2. Ask each question in Perplexity, ChatGPT (with search on), and Google (read the AI answer at the top).
  3. For each, record: are you named? Who is named instead? What sources does the answer cite?

This is your baseline. Most sites discover they are named for their own brand name and nothing else. That gap is the opportunity.

Step 2: Fix what the engines reward

Now the concrete work, in rough order of leverage.

a. Let the AI crawlers in. This is binary. If you block them, no amount of good content matters. Check your robots.txt and explicitly allow the answer-engine crawlers, by name, not just the wildcard:

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /

If any of these is disallowed, you are invisible to that engine regardless of content quality. Fix this first.

b. Answer first, in 40 to 60 words. AI engines lift the cleanest, most direct answer they can find. Put a short, plain, complete answer to the exact question at the very top of the relevant page, before the fluff. Lead with the answer, then explain. This single change moves things faster than almost anything else.

c. Add the structured data they trust. Answer engines read schema.org markup to understand and quote you cleanly. On any answer-shaped page, add FAQPage schema with the real questions and concise answers, HowTo schema for step-by-step fixes, and Article or ItemList schema where they fit. The FAQ and HowTo schemas matter most. They hand the engine a pre-formatted answer it can quote.

d. Build the page as an answer, not a brochure. Question-shaped headings. Short paragraphs. Honest, specific claims. If you are comparing options, a clear "top N" list. Structured, extractable content is what gets pulled into an answer.

e. Cover Bing, not just Google. ChatGPT leans heavily on Bing's index for its search answers. Register your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap. This is a free step most people skip, and it is a direct line into the ChatGPT channel. Everyone fights over Google; Bing ranks easier.

f. Earn agreement across the web. Answer engines look for consensus before they name you confidently. The same positioning showing up on your own site, plus a Reddit thread, a directory listing, a review site, a dev.to post, all pointing the same way, builds the trust that gets you cited. One good, genuinely helpful post in the right community is worth more than a dozen backlinks.

Step 3: Re-measure and prove it

Wait for the engines to re-crawl, then run the exact same questions from Step 1 again. Timelines we have seen hold up:

Compare against your baseline. You now have a before and after, not a promise. Then repeat the loop on the next set of questions.

The checklist

Run this on any page you want the AI to name:

The honest limits

AEO is a slow-compounding lever, not a switch. You cannot force an AI to name you, and anyone who guarantees a citation is selling you something. What you can do is make the fixes that measurably move it, and watch the before-and-after. Some queries are crowded and hard; some are wide open. Ranking position still matters, because an engine that cannot find you in the first place cannot cite you. And AI answers change. Staying named is ongoing work, not a one-time task. That is the honest shape of it.

Would rather have it handled?

We measure the questions your buyers ask, make the fixes, and show you the before and after. Start with a free visibility check.

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The engines are answering questions about your market right now. The only question is whether they name you.

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