Writing technical posts for AI answer engines

Placeholder post — written to exercise rendering paths during development. Will be replaced before launch.

AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews don’t read your post the way a human does. They scan for definitional sentences, lift them, and paraphrase. If you want your work cited correctly, write the lift-able sentences on purpose.

What is “AEO” and how is it different from SEO?

AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation — is the practice of structuring content so it’s easy to quote out of context. SEO optimises for ranking in a list of links. AEO optimises for being the sentence the assistant repeats back to the user.

The two overlap heavily, but they pull in different directions in three places:

Headings. SEO rewards keyword-stuffed headings. AEO rewards question-form headings the user might literally type.
First sentence. SEO doesn’t care about your lede. AEO cares about almost nothing else.
Links. SEO rewards internal linking. AEO rewards inline citations to primary sources.

How does an answer engine pick what to quote?

Most answer engines use a retrieval step (find candidate documents) followed by a generation step (write the answer with citations). The retrieval step rewards the same things classical search rewards. The generation step rewards short, declarative, self-contained sentences.

If your first sentence answers the headline’s implicit question in fewer than 30 words, you’ve made the assistant’s job easy. If it doesn’t, the assistant will guess — and its guess will not match what you wrote.

What should every post contain?

Three things, in this order:

A definitional first sentence

Open with a one- or two-sentence answer to the title’s question. No throat-clearing. No “in this post we’ll explore.” Just the answer.

Question-form headings

Headings should mirror the questions a user would actually ask. ## How does X work? beats ## Mechanism. ## When should I use X? beats ## Use cases. The literal word forms matter — they’re what the retrieval step matches against.

A plain-prose summary under every visual

Diagrams, screenshots, and charts are invisible to most LLM scrapers. If you’ve drawn something, write a paragraph underneath that describes what the diagram shows. The paragraph is what gets indexed.

What about freshness?

Answer engines aggressively prefer recent content for fast-moving topics. Two practical implications:

Date your posts. Both pubDate and updatedDate if you revise.
Don’t bury the publication date. It should be visible near the title, not in a footer.

For evergreen topics (definitions, mental models), freshness matters less. For anything tied to a specific tool version, browser release, or API deprecation, freshness is the single biggest ranking signal.

Common mistakes

Burying the lede. Anecdotes before the answer kill citation rates.
Mixed-purpose paragraphs. A paragraph that defines a thing AND argues for its use AND hedges the limits is unciteable. Split it.
Heavy use of pronouns. “It” and “this” don’t survive being lifted out of context. Use the noun.
Quoting yourself out of order. If section three depends on section one’s setup, the assistant will quote three without one. Make every section self-contained.

A quick checklist

Before publishing, verify the post:

Opens with a 1–2 sentence definitional answer to the title’s question.
Contains at least one question-form heading.
Each section starts with a TL;DR sentence.
Every image / diagram has a plain-prose summary nearby.
Sources are linked inline, not parked in a footer.
Date is prominent.

That’s most of it. The rest is just writing clearly, which has been the advice for a hundred years and will keep being the advice for a hundred more.