Structuring pages for AEO and answer engines is crucial to ensure your content is easily understood, extracted, and cited by AI-driven search results. Clear headings, concise answers, schema markup, and intent-focused sections help your content surface as direct answers, not just links.

HubSpot has published ‘How to structure pages for AEO and answer engines: A quick-start guide‘.

Erica Santiago says, “Page structure is critical for AEO because of how answer engines synthesize content.

In the past, we marketers would format our blog and website content so that search engines could “crawl” our pages, looking for keywords and backlinks to determine how the content would rank in SERPs.

The right combination of keywords and links would help determine whether the content ranked first in search results or ended up on the dreaded second page.

Now, LLMs like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity do more than just crawl for keywords; they analyze, extract, and synthesize content in real time. Unlike traditional search engines, which primarily match keywords and evaluate backlinks, LLMs analyze your content as contextual information within their token limits.

If your page is poorly structured, engines like ChatGPT could miss your best insights entirely, pull information out of context, or simply skip over your content in favor of a competitor‘s page that’s easier to process.”

How to structure pages for AEO and answer engines: A quick-start guide

HubSpot