Answer engine optimization has a lot of surface area, but not everything on the checklist actually shifts citations. After running this program across a dozen B2B and consumer brands, two levers dominate. The rest are hygiene.
The two levers that matter
- Extractable answers: short, self-contained paragraphs directly under a question-shaped H2.
- Entity density: consistent brand naming and category association across authoritative third-party sources.
The hygiene layer
Structured data, canonical URLs, and clean crawl paths still matter — they are the price of entry. But once those are in place, doubling down on them does not compound. Move on to entity work.
How we measure it
We track a fixed prompt matrix weekly across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. The unit of value is a citation, not a rank. Any change we ship has to move that number within four weeks or we cut it.