Vocabulary: AXO, AEO, and GEO
π€ AXO — Agent Experience Optimization
Definition: AXO focuses on making websites and APIs readable and understandable by AI agents, crawlers, and machine systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude.
Goal: Ensure that AI-powered systems can interpret and act on your digital content.
Key Elements:
- Use of
.well-known/agent.jsonfiles to declare your API endpoints and data structure. - Machine-readable policies such as
refunds.json,business-hours.json, andsla.json. - Accessible, well-structured APIs with clear documentation (OpenAPI 3.1+).
- AI visibility audits and compliance with ethical crawler guidelines (GPTBot, PerplexityBot, etc.).
Why It Matters: Websites optimized for AXO can be directly cited and used by AI tools, increasing visibility in agent-based ecosystems.
π¬ AEO — Answer Engine Optimization
Definition: AEO is the evolution of SEO. It focuses on optimizing your website so that AI-driven answer engines (like Google AI Overview, Bing Copilot, or Perplexity) can extract accurate, structured answers directly from your content.
Goal: Make your content answer-ready for AI summarizers and voice assistants.
Key Elements:
- Use of structured data (JSON-LD) for
FAQPage,HowTo,Product, andLocalBusinessschemas. - Clear and concise question–answer sections.
- Semantic markup using schema.org and Open Graph metadata.
- Readable, factual, and cited content suitable for AI summarization.
Why It Matters: AEO helps your website appear in AI-powered snippets, summaries, and “People Also Ask” results.
π GEO — Graph Engine Optimization
Definition: GEO refers to the process of optimizing your digital presence for Knowledge Graphs — the interconnected data systems that power AI understanding of entities, relationships, and context.
Goal: Help AI systems build an accurate knowledge graph representation of your brand, people, products, and organization.
Key Elements:
- Entity linking: making sure your name, brand, or organization appears consistently across platforms (Google, Wikidata, LinkedIn, etc.).
- Use of
@idandsameAsattributes in JSON-LD to connect profiles. - Publishing open datasets and API endpoints that expose structured relationships.
- Participation in open linked-data ecosystems.
Why It Matters: GEO ensures your presence in AI knowledge graphs, improving how AI systems interpret and connect your digital identity.
π§ The Connection Between AXO, AEO, and GEO
These three optimization layers are interconnected:
- AXO ensures agents can access and understand your data.
- AEO ensures your content provides direct answers.
- GEO ensures your brand and entities are recognized and connected within the AI knowledge graph.
Together, they form the foundation of AI Visibility Optimization (AIO) — a holistic approach to preparing your digital ecosystem for the era of intelligent agents and answer engines.
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