Editorial map
The discipline, mapped
The 7 pillars of AEO.
The structural map of Answer Engine Optimization — every editorial piece, every audit item, every product on this site lives under one of these seven pillars.
Most "AEO advice" in 2026 collapses into a hodgepodge of tactics — schema, llms.txt, listicles, robots.txt, prompt monitoring — without an organizing structure. The AEO Report uses a seven-pillar map. Every audit item, every editorial piece, every vendor scorecard ladders up to one of these.
Use this page as the navigation backbone. Pick the pillar you care about — discoverability if you're not appearing at all, citability if you're crawled but not cited, monitoring if you need to prove ROI to leadership.
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Pillar 01
Discoverability
The plumbing layer — can AI engines find and crawl your site at all?
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Pillar 02
Citability
Once an engine can read you, will it pick you as the answer?
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Pillar 03
Authority signals
Why should an engine trust you over a competitor with the same content?
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Pillar 04
Structured data
The schema layer that AI engines actually parse.
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Pillar 05
Content optimization
Writing for citation extraction — clarity, freshness, original data.
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Pillar 06
Engine-specific coverage
Each AI engine has its own quirks — optimize for the engine, not the abstract.
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Pillar 07
Monitoring
You cannot improve what you cannot measure.