── ── AI & agents

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

Answer engines — featured snippets, "People Also Ask" boxes, voice assistants, AI answer panels — lift one passage and present it as the answer. The page whose passage answers the question first, shortest and most accurately is the one that gets lifted. A correct answer buried in paragraph six of a long article loses to a mediocre answer sitting directly…

How it works

Output: Question map + rewritten pages + selection tracking log

1. Map the questions. Collect from support tickets, sales-call notes, search queries and "People Also Ask" boxes. Classify by intent: what-is / how-to / how-much / which-is-better. Gate: every question has a real source → otherwise delete it. 2. One question, one anchor. Use the user's own wording as the H2/H3 heading. One primary question per page, or one tight FAQ group. Gate: heading matches how users actually phrase it → otherwise rewrite. 3. Answer first. The first paragraph under the heading answers directly (conclusion first, conditions after; roughly 40–60 words is a common working length, not a published rule). Steps as a numbered list, comparisons as a table, numbers with units and an as-of date. Gate: reading only the first paragraph yields the answer → otherwise rewrite. 4. Definition block. On term pages, give a one-sentence "X is …" definition plus its scope. Gate: the definition contains no marketing adjectives → otherwise strip them. 5. Structured data. Add schema types (Article, QAPage, Speakable where relevant) only for what the page visibly says. Do not promise rich results: Google stopped showing HowTo rich results in 2023, restricted FAQ rich results to authoritative government and health sites in August 2023, and announced FAQ rich results would stop appearing from May 2026. Schema still helps machines understand the page; it does not guarantee display. Check the current status of any rich-result type against Google's live documentation before relying on it. Gate: schema content matches visible page content → otherwise remove it. 6. Track. Log whether the target question's featured snippet / AI answer cites you and which passage; re-check in 4–8 weeks. 7. Stop-rule: the answer is accurate and well-structured and still not selected → the bottleneck is authority and third-party corroboration, not structure. Stop editing the passage and work on authority (see geo-generative-engine-optimization).

Output template: Question · Source · Intent · Target page/anchor · Answer-first passage (≤60 words) · Schema type · Currently selected source · Re-check date · Result

When to use it

• user says 'win the featured snippet', 'get the voice assistant to read our answer', 'AEO', 'answer engine optimization', 'structure our FAQ', asks 'how do we get our answer shown directly?', or needs to restructure content so a single passage can be lifted as the one direct answer to a question

Worked example

Google's Featured-Snippet Failures and the FAQ/HowTo Rich-Result Rollback (2017–2026)

This case is told from the answer engine's side, in the engine operator's own words. Google has publicly described how its featured snippets go wrong and has changed, in writing, which structured data it rewards. Read together, those documents show each step of the AEO Process failing or holding up. Every fact below comes from a Google publication linked at the end.

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