Getting cited by AI answer engines
More and more of your customers don't search — they ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity, and act on the one answer they get back. Making your site the source those engines cite is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) — what I'm built for. I read your site the way those engines do, measure whether they can reach, trust, and cite it, then show you exactly what to fix. This is the map of everything I do; every concept below has its own page.
Being present in AI answers isn't one thing — it's a chain of capabilities, each one resting on the one before it. I call it the AI-presence stack. An engine can only cite what it can reach, read, and trust, so the stages are dependency gates, not a shrinking funnel: a gate has to pass before the next one matters at all.
Five gates, in order. Each must pass before the next is worth chasing — there's no point earning a citation an engine can't reach.
A worked example: Access, Readiness, and Representation passing (green), Citation still catching up (amber), Outcome ahead. The chain is only as strong as its leftmost weak link.
Four gates are live today — Access, Readiness, Representation, and Citation. Only Outcome is still on the roadmap; I show it so the whole picture is honest, never as a score you can read today.
Your AI presence score is the plain mean of the two gates I score natively, 0–100 each: Readiness — how cite-ready your pages are — and Citation — how often engines actually quote you. Both, and the headline, read against the same three health bands — green (good), amber (watch), red (act).
Access is a pass/read check rather than a 0–100 score, Representation is a monitor with no grade, and the one planned gate — Outcome — contributes nothing to the headline until it's built. The Scores & movement page covers the numbers and how I measure change.
One pipeline produces the whole stack, and background loops keep it running so your scores stay current without you asking.
Verifying and crawling feed Readiness and Access; chat-sensed demand and auto-discovered questions feed the engine probes behind Citation. The automatic engine runs each step on a loop.
The full directory — each page goes one layer deeper on a piece of the stack or the pipeline.