Move 1 — Audit extractability at the paragraph level
Most AEO engagements start the same way: we crawl the client's priority URLs the way an answer engine does, then score every paragraph on extractability. Can a 40-word answer be cleanly lifted? Does the sentence stand alone or does it require the three paragraphs before it to make sense? Is the entity phrased consistently with how the rest of the web refers to it? Does the surrounding content reinforce the claim or contradict it?
The output is a ranked list of passages to rewrite, passages to delete, and passages to leave alone. It looks mundane. It is the single highest-leverage document in an AEO engagement. Most teams discover that perhaps 20% of their existing content is actually quotable — and that the other 80% is diluting the 20% by surrounding it with noise.
Move 2 — Restructure into TL;DR + depth
Answer engines look for a clean passage they can lift. Human readers want the depth that justifies trust. The structural answer to both problems is the same: TL;DR block first, depth second. Every priority page gets a 40–80 word answer block at the top of its main content area — self-contained, atomic, entity-resolved — followed by the long-form content that makes the page worth ranking in classical SEO. The TL;DR is for the engine. The long-form is for the human and for the authority signal.
Move 3 — Ship comprehensive schema
Schema is where most sites are either absent, wrong, or present-but-meaningless. We ship a unified JSON-LD architecture across every template — Organization, Service, Product, Article, FAQPage, HowTo, BreadcrumbList — with stable entity IDs that resolve across pages. The critical move is using @id references to connect pages into a single knowledge graph: the same Organization node referenced from every ProfessionalService, the same Author referenced from every Article. Engines that parse schema reward coherence.
Deep dive: schema markup for AI search.
Move 4 — Stabilize entity phrasing
Every mention of your brand, your products, your services and your key people should use the same phrasing, the same spelling, the same disambiguating context. If half the site calls you "Knowledge Navigators Agency" and half calls you "Knowledge Navigators," the engine has to pick one — and the ambiguity reduces citation confidence. We build a named-entity style guide and run it as a CI check on new content. Dull work. High compounding.
For background, see our entity SEO complete guide.
Move 5 — Measure across six engines, monthly
The whole playbook is dead without measurement. We maintain a rotating prompt panel of 200–500 buyer queries per client and run them against Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Copilot every month. For each engine, we track: was the brand named at all, in what position, with what context, with what competing brands, with a direct link or without. The monthly delta is what guides the next iteration — and it's the only metric honest enough to show when a move isn't working.
What this looks like end-to-end
A typical AEO engagement ships the first extractability audit in week two, the first TL;DR rewrites in week four, the full schema architecture in week six, and the first measurement cycle in week eight. Results start to appear in Perplexity and Google AI Overviews around the 30-day mark, and in the training-cycle engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) over 90–180 days. Nothing about this is magic. It's engineering applied to a surface most teams haven't noticed moved.