Bots now account for more than half of the web, according to Cloudflare.

Across its network, automated systems now make more requests for web pages than people do. AI agents are growing fast too: their daily requests increased by more than 1,700% over the past year.

For businesses, this changes who is reading your website. Alongside the people visiting it, automated systems are increasingly finding, interpreting and presenting information about your business. The question is whether your website gives them a clear and accurate picture.

Answer engine optimization, or AEO, is the work of making that information easier to find, understand, and use in an answer.  We'd approach it as an extension of good website strategy: clear content, reliable technical foundations, and evidence that helps someone make a decision.

Here are five specific improvements we'd start with.

1. Check crawler access and indexing

Start by checking whether search crawlers can reach your most important pages and read the content you've published.

Review robots.txt alongside your hosting, CDN, and firewall settings.  Confirm that the search crawlers you want to allow can retrieve your public content without being blocked or presented with a challenge screen.  Review search and training access separately using each provider's documented controls, including OpenAI's crawler guidance.

Use Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool to check indexing, canonical URLs, and the content Google receives.  Resolve unintended noindex directives, update your XML sitemap, and make sure your priority pages are included.

Keep essential content available as readable text in the delivered page.  After changes, inspect the affected URLs again and review server or CDN logs to confirm access is working as intended.

2. Add visible, structured FAQs

Collect the questions your sales and support teams answer repeatedly, then place the answers on the pages where customers need them.

Give each question a descriptive heading and begin with a direct answer.  Follow with the detail needed to make an informed decision, keeping related information together.  This answer-first structure helps each section make sense on its own while remaining easy to scan as part of the page.

Build the FAQs as text within your page templates, with a consistent heading hierarchy and accessible controls if you use accordions.  Check that the answers are present in the rendered HTML and can be read without submitting a form or signing in.

Assign an owner to review the answers whenever your services, pricing, or processes change, so customers and search systems encounter the same current information.

3. Implement accurate JSON-LD across your templates

Use JSON-LD to give the information on your pages explicit structured labels.  Google recommends this format for most implementations, and it can be maintained alongside your CMS templates.

Audit the markup your site already generates, then map the appropriate schema types to your company, editorial, and product content.  For Organization markup, maintain your business name, website, logo, and official profile links.  For Article markup, connect the headline, author, image, and publication and modification dates to the corresponding CMS fields.

Generate those values from the same fields used on the visible page.  This keeps your structured data aligned when the content changes and gives your team one place to maintain each detail.

Validate each template with the Schema Markup Validator and use Google's Rich Results Test to check supported search features.  Resolve errors and repeat the checks after changes to your CMS or page templates.

4. Connect related content with contextual internal links

Review how your service pages, articles, and case studies connect.  Add links within the relevant copy so readers can move directly from an explanation to the supporting detail or evidence.

Use descriptive link text that tells someone what they'll find at the destination.  Prioritize links that help them understand a service, assess your work, or take the next step.

Check that priority pages have incoming links from other relevant pages, and replace broken links or unnecessary redirects with the correct destination URLs.  Use standard HTML links that search crawlers can follow.

Make this part of your publishing process: whenever you add or substantially update a page, review both the links it needs and the existing pages that should link to it.

5. Keep your existing business profiles consistent

Review the external profiles your business already maintains and compare them with your website.  Align your business name, website URL, description, contact details, and service information wherever those fields appear.

For location-based businesses, check addresses, opening hours, and service areas in your Google Business Profile.  Keep the description of your business consistent across existing professional, industry, and company profiles, while adapting the level of detail to each platform.

Link your website to your official profiles where useful, and keep the sameAs references in your Organization markup aligned with those identities.

Maintain a simple list of the profiles your team owns and who can update them.  Include a profile review whenever your positioning, services, contact information, or location changes, so those updates carry through beyond your website.

Make these checks part of website maintenance

We'd begin with your priority pages and their shared templates, then work through the five areas as a single review.  Assign the technical checks to your development team and the content and profile updates to the people who maintain that information.

Once the first pass is complete, build these checks into your publishing and maintenance process.  Your website will give people and search systems a clearer, more consistent understanding of your business as it evolves.