It’s not surprising to learn that the majority of internet queries now produce AI-generated responses. What may be less immediately apparent is the fact that any query happening on ChatGPT, Claude, Google, etc. is wholly within that platform’s control to answer however it sees fit, whether it’s fair to your institution or not. Managing that opportunity is known as AEO: Answer Engine Optimization. And while that may sound like the “SEO” days all over again, there are several key distinctions.
Why does it matter in Higher Ed?
Recruitment: students may form a shortlist before ever visiting your site
Admissions & academics advising: tuition, admission requirements, and program names change often, and AI tools can repeat stale or wrong versions
Institutional reputation: rankings aggregators and forums can end up defining how your institution is described
Student success: the same logic helps current students find answers about registration, aid, and deadlines
It’s a lot to take in, and even more to stay on top of… which is why specialized AEO agencies charge upwards of $20,000 per month to optimize your AI presence. A large part of that agency labor goes into 1) gathering all your existing knowledge and materials, and 2) reframing and optimizing that knowledge as effective content in the moment. As it turns out, your skilly does both of those things by design, and so we’re happy to offer AEO as a free feature to all clients.
To get started, navigate to Agent Studio > AEO:
Free AEO Audit
This is your overall AEO score and diagnostic overview, auditing in detail the most crucial components of answer engine optimization:
- Crawler Access
- Indexability & Meta
- Structured Data
- Content Structure
- Social / Open Graph
- Rendering
It’s an exhaustive list of best practices for AEO and detailed guidance on why each component matters. The majority of action items on this list can be tackled by your web team, and can notably improve how discoverable, readable, and most of all, authoritative, your website is in the eyes of AI crawlers.
Your audit starts by clicking the “Run Diagnostic” button.
Content Recommendations
Skilly is in the unique position of having learned both your institution’s most influential knowledge, and your users’ most popular questions. Combined with its proprietary conversation training, the result is a list of your top 25 questions and their most easily cited answers. This content should be placed throughout your site, and fortunately one of the most important pages you can create is already built into skilly: your FAQ page. More on that in the next section.
As part of our AEO offering, skilly takes those questions and regularly queries the major LLMs to evaluate how they interpret your content, and to what degree the LLMs directly cite your content as a source. The more citations you have, the more often users will be directed to your site from their LLM queries.
On your Sources page, you’ll also see an overall “sources” score for each major LLM.
AEO-Optimized FAQ Pages
Here’s where our AEO feature really works its magic. LLMs and other AI platforms prefer to read a specific, standardized file structure in order to develop a foundational idea of who you are and where your authority lies. It’s known as the llms.txt file, and placing it at your website root (/llms.txt) makes your institution much more machine-readable by AI systems. Skilly builds this file for you, and automatically maintains it once uploaded to your website.
The same goes for the FAQ pages you generate, and the one we specifically recommend for AEO is the list of your top 25 questions from the Content Recommendations section, uploaded with the URL structure “/top-questions”, as a best practice. Skilly provides a script you can insert into this /top-questions page which will automatically fetch the most current version of your top 25 questions… meaning, you create this page once, and from that moment on your site will showcase the most up-to-date and compelling content LLMs are looking for, in exactly the place they prefer to look for it.
Need a more in-depth primer? Get in touch with your favorite human at skillyAI, or contact us here.