FAQ
AEO and AI search questions
Short, hype-free answers to the questions teams ask before starting AEO work.
- What is Answer Engine Optimization?
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of preparing a website so AI answer engines can read, understand, quote and cite it. It combines technical access, semantic clarity and directly answerable content.
- What is an AEO Analyzer?
- An AEO Analyzer inspects a page or a whole site and scores how prepared it is for answer engines. Varazm's analyzer checks 25 factors across crawlability, structure, metadata, structured data, entity clarity, answerability, attribution and AI crawler access.
- How is AEO different from SEO?
- SEO optimises for a position in a list of results; AEO optimises for inclusion inside a generated answer. Most technical SEO work still helps, but AEO adds entity clarity, factual attribution and AI crawler permissions.
- How is AEO different from GEO?
- They describe almost the same work. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) emphasises generative assistants such as ChatGPT and Gemini, while AEO also covers answer boxes in classic search. Varazm reports both under AI Visibility.
- What is AI Visibility?
- AI Visibility is how often your brand actually appears in answers produced by AI engines for a tracked set of prompts. It is measured from stored responses, not estimated from your page.
- What is an AI citation?
- An AI citation is a source link attached to an AI answer that points at a specific URL. Varazm extracts citations from every stored answer and reports them by domain and by page.
- What is a brand mention?
- A brand mention is your brand name appearing in the text of an answer, with or without a link. Mentions measure awareness; citations measure sourcing, and the two are stored separately.
- How does Varazm calculate readiness?
- Readiness is computed from the page itself: 25 weighted factors grouped into technical, structural, semantic and content categories. The same page always produces the same score until the page changes.
- Does Varazm query AI engines directly?
- Yes, for prompt tracking. Tracked prompts are sent to the connected engines and the returned answers are stored so mentions, citations and sentiment can be extracted from real output.
- Which engines are monitored live?
- Live prompt runs are executed against the answer engines connected to your workspace, and every stored run records which engine produced it. Readiness modelling covers a wider list of engine profiles, and the two counts are always labelled separately in the interface.
- Why do AI responses change between runs?
- Generative models sample from a probability distribution, so the same prompt can produce different brands and sources each time. This is why a single run is never treated as a result — repeated runs are.
- What is Share of Voice?
- Share of Voice is the proportion of tracked answers mentioning your brand compared with those mentioning your competitors. It only becomes meaningful once you register the competitors you want to be measured against.
- What is Citation Share?
- Citation Share is the percentage of source links in tracked answers that point at your domain. It moves more slowly than mentions and is a stronger signal of source-level trust.
- What is Sentiment in AEO reporting?
- Sentiment is the tone an answer takes towards your brand — positive, neutral, negative or mixed — judged from the sentence containing the mention. Varazm stores the evidence snippet with every rating.
- How often should AI visibility be measured?
- Weekly is a sensible baseline for most brands, with more frequent runs during an active AEO project. What matters more than frequency is keeping the prompt set stable so periods stay comparable.
- Does schema markup guarantee an AI citation?
- No. Valid structured data removes ambiguity and helps engines extract facts, but citation depends on the answer, the prompt and the competing sources. Schema is an aid to understanding, not a guarantee.
- Does llms.txt guarantee AI visibility?
- No. llms.txt is an optional, machine-readable publishing aid that lists your key documents for AI clients. It is cheap to maintain and can help discovery, but no major engine treats it as a ranking or citation guarantee.
- Can robots.txt block AI discovery?
- Yes. Disallowing retrieval bots such as OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot can remove your pages from live answers even when the content is excellent. Varazm reports each AI crawler separately with the exact rule causing its status.
- Can Varazm compare competitors?
- Yes. You can benchmark up to three rival domains with the same 25 factors as your own site, and track competitor share of voice over time from the same stored answers.
- Can Varazm monitor different countries and languages?
- Yes. Prompts are stored with their language and locale, so English and Persian prompt sets are tracked and reported separately rather than being averaged together.
- How is my data stored?
- Scans, prompts and stored answers belong to your account and are protected by row-level security, so only you and authorised administrators can read them. Nothing from your workspace appears in public research without explicit consent.
- Does Varazm use estimated or live data?
- Both, clearly separated. Readiness scores are estimated from your pages; visibility, citations, share of voice and sentiment come from live answers stored at run time. The interface never presents one as the other.
- What should I do after an AEO audit?
- Start with blocking issues — crawler access and rendering — then fix structure and structured data, then rewrite the pages that answer your priority questions. Re-run the audit after each batch so the change is attributable.
- Can agencies use Varazm?
- Yes. Agencies run audits and prompt sets for multiple client domains from one account, and can export reports as PDF or CSV for client delivery.
- Can developers use the API?
- Yes. Token-authenticated REST endpoints expose audits and prompt data so you can trigger scans and pull results into your own dashboards or CI pipeline.