AEO: be the answer

One answer, a few sources

A parent types a whole question into an AI assistant: "What's a good space shooter my kid can install from a website?" They don't get ten blue links. They get one written answer, with a few small links to the pages it came from.

Tools like this are answer engines: Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT search, Perplexity, and Claude with web search. Helping our pages become one of those cited sources is AEO, answer engine optimisation. Some people call it GEO, generative engine optimisation.

SEO still comes first

SEO (search engine optimisation) helps search engines find, store and show our pages. Crawlers read the site, the index stores it, and Search Console reports how it's doing (the Search Console lesson goes deep).

Answer engines are built on top of search. Google's own guide says a page can be a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode if it is indexed and allowed to show a snippet. No extra technical requirements, no special file or markup. Those clicks count in Search Console's Performance report, under the Web search type.

Write to be quoted

• Facts and numbers"12 waves, 4 bosses, 60 FPS" is easy to quote. "Tons of awesome levels" is not.
• A visible date"Updated October 2026" tells readers and machines the facts are current.
• Fast, readable pagesReal text that loads quickly, not words baked into images or hidden behind clicks.
• Mentions elsewhereReviews, creator videos and articles that name our games give answer engines more trusted sources about us.

An answer engine runs searches, reads the top pages and lifts short passages: a few sentences that make sense on their own. So we write pages that are easy to quote:

• A direct answer in the first sentence or two under each heading.
• Headings written as the questions people ask, like "Does Hyper Shards work offline?"
• An FAQ section: common questions with short, honest answers.

Structured data: labels for machines

Structured data is a hidden block of facts about a page, written in the shared vocabulary of schema.org. The usual format is JSON-LD, inside a <script type="application/ld+json"> tag. Schema.org has a VideoGame type with properties like genre, gamePlatform and playMode, and an FAQPage type for questions and answers.

Keep claims modest. Google says its AI features need no special schema, and it stopped showing FAQ rich results in May 2026. Structured data still states our facts plainly for any machine, as long as it matches what the page shows.

Which AI crawlers may read us?

AI companies send crawlers with their own names, and robots.txt (the crawl-rules file at the root of our site) can treat each one differently:

• Search crawlers fetch pages so assistants can find and cite them: OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT), Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot.
• Training crawlers collect text that may train future models: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and the Google-Extended token for Gemini.

OpenAI says these settings are independent, and Google says Google-Extended doesn't affect Google Search. So a studio can welcome search and still say no to training. The team and a parent choose together.

Bolt says: You may hear about llms.txt: a Markdown file at /llms.txt that gives AI tools a short map of a site, proposed by Jeremy Howard in 2024. Support is uneven, and Google says its AI features don't need it, so treat it as an optional extra.

Measure it, and stay humble

Two ways to see if AEO is working:

• Referral traffic: analytics shows visits that arrive from sites like chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai. ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it sends, so those visits are easy to count.
• Ask the assistants yourself: once a month, you and a parent ask the same five questions, like "best browser space shooter", and note which pages get cited.

Nobody controls what an AI says, and answers change daily. We can only make our pages clear, true and easy to read. Hidden text aimed at machines is spam under Google's rules.

Bolt says: Answer engines read pages. Next: AI agents, which also click buttons and fill in forms.