Frevana’s 2026 Guide: Best Practices for Answer Engine Optimization

15 min read · Jan 30, 2026

Executive Summary

Search isn’t “10 blue links” anymore.

In 2026, your next customer is just as likely to ask:

“What’s the best CRM for a 5-person sales team?”
“Which vitamin brand is safest for kids?”
“What’s a cheaper alternative to [competitor]?”

And they’re not asking Google first. They’re asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Amazon Rufus, and a growing list of AI answer engines.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is how brands win in that new reality.

This guide breaks down what’s actually working right now in AEO, and how to turn it into a repeatable system using modern tools like Frevana’s end-to-end AEO agents. You’ll walk away knowing:

How answer engines “think” and choose which brands to recommend
The core pillars of effective AEO in 2026
Practical workflows you can run every month
How to measure your AI visibility and turn it into a real growth channel

If you’ve nailed SEO but feel completely in the dark about AI answers, this is your new playbook.

Introduction: The Moment SEO Stopped Being Enough

Picture this.

A buyer who is basically your dream customer opens ChatGPT and types:

“What are the top 3 tools for AI-driven customer research for small SaaS companies?”

In seconds, ChatGPT lists three brands.

Your biggest competitor is there.
You are not.

You never see it happen. No impression, no click, no “organic session” in Google Analytics. Just a private conversation in a chat window… and a decision that doesn’t include you.

This quiet moment is happening millions of times a day.

Traditional SEO was built for a web of pages. AEO is built for a web of answers. If you want to show up in those answers, you need to understand:

What people actually ask AI agents
How answer engines decide which brands to surface
How to structure your site, content, and reputation so you become the obvious choice

That’s what Answer Engine Optimization is about — and where platforms like Frevana are helping brands write the new rulebook.

Market Insights: How AI Answer Engines Really Choose Winners

From Keywords to Questions

Classic SEO starts with:

“What keywords have high volume and low difficulty?”

AEO flips that:

“What questions do real people ask AI when they’re about to buy?”

Frevana’s platform has studied tens of millions of AI user queries across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and more. A few things stand out:

Queries are longer, more specific, and more personal than search keywords
People share context: budget, team size, niche, region, tools they already use
They ask for recommendations and rankings, not just information
They keep asking follow-ups until they’re confident enough to decide

You’re not just optimizing for “best project management software” anymore. You’re optimizing for:

“Best project management tool for early-stage tech startups under $50/month”
“Alternative to Asana that’s easier for non-technical teams”
“Which tools integrate well with Slack and Notion?”

It’s less like billboard marketing and more like being ready for a very specific, very honest coffee chat with your ideal customer.

The New “Ranking Factors” of AEO

Answer engines don’t care about SERP positions. They care about credible, context-aware answers they can stand behind.

While each model has its quirks, we see a few consistent signals:

Structured, machine-readable information
- Clear product pages that spell out pricing, features, and use cases
- Clean sitemaps, sensible robots.txt, and emerging hints like forms.txt
- Content that LLMs can scan, parse, and summarize without getting lost
Topical authority and depth
- Real expertise: content that goes beyond surface-level feature lists
- Coverage across the entire decision journey (educating → evaluating → buying)
- Alignment between your own site and external mentions
Brand preference signals
- How confidently and how often AI engines already recommend your brand
- Whether people then ask follow-ups about you (a signal of interest)
- External credibility: reviews, PR, roundups, and third-party references
Alignment with user intent
- Does your content answer the exact question someone might ask?
- Does it address their real-world constraints (budget, region, team size)?
- Is it clear who your product is for and not for?

The brands that win AEO are the ones that feed answer engines everything they need to say, confidently:

“You should consider [Your Brand] for this specific situation — here’s why.”

Product Relevance: Where Frevana Fits in the AEO Stack

Most teams who dip their toes into AEO hit the same three walls:

They don’t really know which AI questions matter in their space.
They can’t see how often they’re cited in AI answers right now.
They struggle to turn insights into consistent content and PR execution.

Frevana was designed to break through all three — end to end.

Here’s how it fits into modern AEO best practices.

1. Discover What People Really Ask AI

Frevana’s User Prompt Research agent digs into real questions people ask answer engines, not just what shows up in keyword tools.

It can:

Surface questions buyers ask when they’re comparing brands or ready to purchase
Map those questions to search intent (informational, commercial, transactional) using the Search Intent Classifier
Turn the findings into a living roadmap:
- Which prompts you absolutely need to win
- Where you’re invisible
- Which competitor-focused prompts you’re missing entirely

What you get is something traditional SEO tools can’t offer:

A live map of real buyer conversations happening inside AI engines.

2. Make AI Visibility Traceable and Measurable

You can’t optimize what you can’t see.

Frevana’s AI Visibility Monitoring and AEO Full-Stack Data Scientist agents:

Track your brand’s presence across multiple AI platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Amazon Rufus, and more)
Monitor a set of prompts that mirror your key buying scenarios
Show you:
- How often your brand is cited
- Where you land (top 3 recs, honorable mention, or nowhere)
- Who you’re up against
- Which platforms are helping you most

Think of it as an “AI SERP” dashboard — but built for answers instead of links.

3. Turn Insights into AEO-Optimized Content and Experiences

Insights are nice. Revenue is nicer. To bridge that gap, Frevana helps you execute:

AEO Content Advisor
- Analyzes AI answers to see what content they’re drawing from
- Spots content gaps by prompt, persona, and scenario
AEO Article Writer
- Generates AEO-optimized articles using your:
  - Blog titles & metadata
  - Product site
  - Target keywords
  - Brand guidelines
- Writes the way answer engines read and summarize
Product Landing Page Maker
- Pulls key details (for example, from Amazon for e-commerce products)
- Builds landing pages designed for bot indexing — structured, simple, and LLM-friendly
LLMs Inc. Sitemap & Robots.txt Auditor
- Audits your sitemap, robots.txt, forms.txt, and more
- Flags crawlability issues and improves AI readability
AEO PR Strategist & Brand Preference Analyst
- Plans PR campaigns built for AEO, not just journalists
- Identifies which brands AI engines currently favor and why
- Helps you craft targeted outreach to close authority and mention gaps

Put it together, and you’ve got:

A fully automated AEO agent team that takes you from
“We think AI might recommend us sometimes…”
to
“We grew our AI recommendation share by nearly half across key prompts in just a few weeks.”

Actionable AEO Best Practices for 2026

Let’s turn all of this into a concrete AEO playbook you can actually run this quarter.

1. Build Your AEO Baseline

Before you try to “improve” anything, you need to know where you stand.

Steps:

List 20–50 “money prompts.”
Ask yourself: “What would my ideal customer actually type into ChatGPT when they’re close to buying?” For example:
- “Best mental health app for college students with anxiety”
- “Cheapest payroll software that works in Canada and Europe”
- “Alternatives to [competitor] with better customer support”
Run these across top answer engines.
Try:
- ChatGPT
- Gemini
- Perplexity
- Amazon Rufus (for e-commerce)
- Any niche or industry-specific models you know your audience uses
Track what you see:
- Are you mentioned at all?
- If yes, where? (Top 3? Buried as a side-note?)
- Which competitors keep showing up?

Tools like Frevana’s AI Visibility Monitoring do this automatically, but you can absolutely start with a simple spreadsheet and some manual prompts.

Your output: A baseline report showing:

Prompts you currently win
Prompts where you’re invisible
Competitors dominating those answers

This becomes the backbone of your AEO roadmap.

2. Align Content to Real User Prompts and Intent

Answer engines love content that feels like a direct, precise answer to a real question — not just a keyword-stuffed brochure.

Map Prompts to Intent

Use Frevana’s Search Intent Classifier or your own framework to tag each prompt as:

Informational

“What is AEO?”
“How do AI answer engines work?”

Commercial

“Best AEO platforms for mid-market SaaS”
“Frevana vs traditional SEO tools”

Transactional

“Frevana pricing”
“Sign up for AEO platform with a 7-day free trial”

Navigational

“Frevana login”
“Frevana case studies”

This helps you avoid publishing 10 blog posts when what you actually needed was one clear pricing page and a solid comparison guide.

Create Content That Mirrors How People Ask AI

For each high-value prompt, create at least one focused asset. For example:

Prompt: “Best CRM for agencies with fewer than 20 employees”
Content: “The 7 Best CRMs for Agencies Under 20 Employees (With Real-World Use Cases)”
Organize it by team size, budget, and type of agency
Be transparent about who each option is best for — including where your product isn’t the perfect fit
Prompt: “Alternative to [competitor] that offers better support”
Content: “[Competitor] Alternatives in 2026: 5 Tools With Faster Support & Better Onboarding”
Use honest, fact-based comparisons — answer engines pick up on nuance, not hype
Prompt: “Is [Your Brand] legit?”
Content: “Why Brands Like [Customer Logos] Trust [Your Brand]: Security, Compliance & Reliability Overview”

Frevana’s AEO Article Writer can speed this up dramatically, especially if you’re working across multiple products or markets.

A few core content principles:

Use headings that echo real questions your customers ask
Include structured elements like comparison tables, pros/cons lists, FAQs
Call out context like budget ranges, team size, or industry directly in the copy
Avoid vague claims and fluff — answer engines reward clarity and specifics

3. Optimize Your Site for LLM Readability

Your site now has two audiences: humans and language models.

LLMs need to:

Find your content
Understand it
Summarize it reliably
Feel confident recommending it

Technical AEO Foundations

Audit your technical setup with AEO in mind:

Sitemaps
- Include your most important pages and keep the structure logical
- Avoid “orphan” pages that nothing links to — LLMs are more likely to miss them
robots.txt & forms.txt
- Double-check you’re not accidentally blocking AI crawlers you actually want
- Use emerging conventions to signal:
  - Which areas are okay to index
  - Which forms and data structures matter
  - Where your key resources live
Structured data & clean HTML
- Use schema where it makes sense (products, FAQs, reviews, how-tos)
- Keep layouts clean and semantic so parsers don’t get confused by visual noise

Frevana’s LLMs Inc. Sitemap & Robots.txt Auditor scans for these issues and gives you prioritized fixes — like a technical SEO audit, but for answer engines.

4. Shape Brand Preference Signals

AEO isn’t just about what you say. It’s about the story the rest of the internet tells about you — and how AI engines read that story.

To influence that, you’ll want a mix of AEO-first PR and smart category analysis.

Analyze Brand Preference in Your Category

Frevana’s Brand Preference Analyst helps you:

See which brands AI engines favor when answering category questions
Understand why they’re favored, including:
- Rich category content and thought leadership
- Strong presence in third-party articles and reviews
- Well-built product descriptions and documentation

This shows you:

Whose playbook the answer engines seem to be following
Which signals you’re missing (for example, not enough credible third-party coverage, thin product pages, or sparse FAQ content)

Run PR for AEO, Not Just Headlines

Traditional PR asks, “How do we land a big headline?”
AEO PR asks, “What content would give answer engines more confidence to recommend us?”

With Frevana’s AEO PR Strategist (or your own PR team with an AEO lens), you can:

Prioritize niche but credible publications in your category
Pitch case studies, original data, and how-to content that:
- Reinforce your category authority
- Mention your product naturally and contextually
- Are easy for AI models to quote and summarize

Over time, this creates a pattern:

Whenever an AI goes hunting for trustworthy sources in your niche, your brand keeps popping up in the supporting cast — and eventually, in the starring role.

5. Design Customer Scenario Content, Not Just Feature Pages

Most people don’t ask AIs, “What’s the best tool with X feature?” They ask about their specific situation:

“We’re a small dental practice switching from paper to digital. What software do we need?”
“We’re a US-based Amazon seller expanding to the EU — what tools help with taxes and compliance?”

Frevana’s Customer Scenario Strategist agent helps uncover these stories at scale. It:

Analyzes how, when, and why customers choose your product
Turns those insights into scenario-based content plans

Your content’s job is to read like a thoughtful response to those situations, including:

The context and pain points
The constraints (budget, geography, team size, industry rules)
Realistic trade-offs between different solutions
Why your product is a strong fit in this scenario — and when it might not be

Answer engines love content that feels like the answer they wish they could have generated themselves for a real human being. Scenario-driven content gives them exactly that.

6. Automate, Monitor, Iterate (Every 2–4 Weeks)

AEO isn’t a “checklist and chill” project. It’s a channel — and channels need ongoing care.

The teams winning in AI answers treat AEO like they treat paid acquisition or lifecycle email: run, review, tweak, repeat.

Every 2–4 weeks:

Review your AI visibility reports
- Which prompts improved?
- Which new prompts started showing up in your category?
- How are you trending on:
  - Citation rate (how often you’re mentioned)
  - Recommendation share vs competitors
  - Visibility across different platforms
Update your content roadmap
- Double down on prompts where you’re showing up but not quite leading
- Add content for newly emerging prompts that buyers are asking
- Refresh or clarify pages that answer engines seem to misunderstand or ignore
Launch new or improved assets
- Articles, landing pages, FAQs, comparison pages, PR content
- Make sure everything’s included in your sitemap and plays nicely with your technical AEO setup
Tie it back to business outcomes
- Watch for lifts in:
  - Direct traffic from people who likely heard about you via AI
  - Branded searches after users ask AI about your category
  - Sign-ups, trials, demo requests, or cart starts
- Compare ROI with what you’re spending on paid ads and classic SEO

Many Frevana customers see clear movement within a few weeks, with stories like:

“We went from never being mentioned to showing up in nearly half of relevant AI answers in two weeks.”
“We became a top-three recommendation on ChatGPT and saw organic traffic multiply in the first month.”

The pattern is consistent:

When you treat AI visibility as a performance channel, it starts behaving like one.

Conclusion: Your 2026 AEO Action Plan

In 2026, ignoring answer engines is like ignoring Google in 2006.

Your customers are already asking AIs which brands to trust. The only real question is: when those answers appear, will you be in the mix — or watching from the sidelines?

Here’s your AEO action plan in a nutshell:

Baseline your AI visibility
- List 20–50 money prompts
- Check your presence across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Amazon Rufus
- Use an AEO platform like Frevana to automate the monitoring
Align content with real AI prompts and intent
- Map prompts to informational, commercial, transactional, and navigational intent
- Create scenario-based, structured content that directly responds to those prompts
Optimize for LLM readability
- Audit sitemaps, robots.txt, forms.txt, and overall crawlability
- Make your site easy for models to parse, summarize, and trust
Strengthen brand preference signals
- Analyze which brands AI engines currently prefer and why
- Run AEO-focused PR and third-party content to build authority
Operationalize with agents, not random tasks
- Use specialized AEO agents for research, content, PR, and technical work
- Review, refine, and relaunch on a 2–4 week cycle

Ready to Turn AI Answers into a Growth Channel?

If you’re ready to move from “we’re invisible in AI” to “we’re the default recommendation in our niche,” Frevana was built for exactly that:

End-to-end AEO agents — from user prompt research to content, PR, and technical tuning
Real-time AI visibility monitoring across multiple answer engines
Automated content workflows aligned with how answer engines actually work
Fast feedback loops, with many brands seeing movement in just a couple of weeks

You can explore it without a big commitment:

7-day free trial
No credit card required just to see your visibility report
Cancel anytime

Your next move:
Find out where you stand in AI answers — and start shaping the recommendations your future customers see.

Start your AEO visibility journey with Frevana, and turn AI answer engines into one of your most reliable growth channels in 2026 and beyond.