What does AEO cover beyond website content?

Answer engine optimization starts with your own pages, but an assistant doesn't stop there. Google's guide to generative AI features in Search says those features work from the Search index, and that they can reflect what blogs, videos and forums say about a product. So what Google's AI features say about your company can come from a page you've never edited.

That describes Google Search. For other assistants we'd plan on a similar assumption and then test it, by looking at which sources each one cites for the questions your buyers ask.

Start with the profiles you manage yourself, because their accuracy is in your hands. Google's guide names Merchant Center feeds and Google Business Profiles as tools that can help what you sell appear in its AI responses and in regular Search results.

Google's help page on local ranking explains what a profile does in ordinary local results. A profile with full, correct details has a better chance of appearing. Google matches a profile to a search by relevance, weighs distance, and considers prominence, meaning how widely the business is known. The number of reviews and how good the ratings are count toward prominence. Google also says a better local ranking can't be requested or bought.

Those are Google's rules for Google Maps and Search, and they aren't a formula for every assistant. Whether your company can have a profile or submit a feed depends on each platform's eligibility rules and on what you sell. Where you do qualify, keep the profile complete and current. Whether off-site work as a whole pays depends on the business, and we cover that in which kinds of companies benefit most from AEO.

Reviews and third-party coverage differ from profiles, because someone else decides what gets published.

Some buyers go on to read reviews after an assistant has answered. In BrightLocal's 2026 consumer review survey, 455 of 1,002 US adults had used an AI tool for local business recommendations in the past year. Among those 455, 97% said they at least sometimes double-check an AI recommendation against real reviews. BrightLocal sells local SEO tools, and the survey covers local businesses only.

Coverage on other sites comes in several forms. An independent article is written and published by someone else. You can also write a contributed article that an editor chooses to publish, or buy a paid placement. The publisher controls the page in each case. What differs is who wrote it and whether you paid, and an independent article is the publisher's own account, which can be critical. We look at individual signals in what off-site signals matter for AEO.

The line between earning coverage and faking it is where this work goes wrong. Google's guide discourages chasing mentions that aren't authentic, because its AI features rely on the same ranking and spam systems as the rest of Search. We wouldn't write our own reviews or present a paid placement as independent coverage. And if you answer a question in a forum, say who you work for.

Agencies sell off-site coverage as its own line of work. Lean Labs lists its off-site Authority System at $5,000 a month for ten months. It describes the program as monthly expert articles on other sites, brand mentions, and progress reporting with citation tracking. Its on-site package is listed at $9,000 one time with the first year included. That package separately includes a system for requesting reviews from customers and a listing in an entity registry.

A lot of off-site work is plain correction. Suppose a software company renamed its product last year and raised its starting price from $49 to $79 a month. Its own site is up to date. A partner directory still lists the old name, and an old review profile still shows $49. An assistant that draws on all three can pick up the old name or the old price. An outdated listing can also mislead a buyer who reads it directly.

So list the places where the company is described, compare each one against the site, and ask the owners to correct what's wrong. It's the first off-site job we'd do.

Video belongs on the list because Google's guide names videos, alongside blogs and forums, among the places its AI features can draw on. A product walkthrough on your own channel and a guest appearance on someone else's are both sources that describe you.

We'd favor a specific demonstration, such as a walkthrough that shows a buyer how one setup step works. Title and describe it accurately, the same way you would a page.

One more piece sits outside content without being off-site: the settings that control crawler access and whether a site is eligible for particular AI search features. OpenAI's crawler documentation describes separate crawlers for ChatGPT search and for model training, each controlled in robots.txt. Google's guide adds that a site must be included in its AI features through a Search Console setting. We cover these in what CMS features matter for AEO.

None of this obliges an assistant to use what it finds. It also doesn't stop an inaccurate page somewhere else from being picked up. That's why we wouldn't treat a guarantee of citations as a credible offer.

To judge the work, record the same things before you start and again afterward: which assistants mention you for the questions you care about, and the visits, contacts and deals that arrive from them. The comparison can't prove the work caused a change. It does show whether anything moved, which is what you need to decide whether to keep going.