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What is AEO, and why crypto projects need it now

By Mincho Stoyanov · · 1 min read

Cover image: “AEO: get your project named in AI answers”, labelled AI search (AEO), on Among Digital’s dark contour-line background

Answer-engine optimisation explained: how to get your project mentioned when people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Gemini about your category.

Ask an assistant “What’s the best L2 for gaming?” or “Which DeFi protocols offer real yield?” and look at which projects it names and which sources it cites.

Answer-engine optimisation (AEO) is the practice of making your project easy for AI assistants to find, understand, trust and cite.

How AEO differs from SEO

SEO is about ranking a page in a list of ten links. An assistant gives one answer and cites a few sources, so the aim with AEO is to be named in the answer or to be one of those sources. Assistants compare sources, which means your docs, site, X profile and third-party coverage should tell the same story.

The groundwork is shared with SEO, since both need crawlable pages with clear headings. Before Among Digital, Mincho Stoyanov led marketing at a Swiss crypto exchange and took its organic search traffic from near zero to 200,000 visitors a month.

Five AEO quick wins for web3 teams

  1. Write a plain-language “What is [project]?” page that answers the question in its first two sentences, then says who it is for and how it works.
  2. Add an FAQ section to your key pages, built from the questions people ask in your Discord or Telegram and marked up with FAQ structured data.
  3. Make your docs crawlable. Don’t hide them behind JavaScript-only rendering or block AI crawlers.
  4. Publish an llms.txt file that points AI systems to your most important pages.
  5. Get listed in the ecosystem directories, comparison sites and research reports assistants already rely on.

We use FAQ markup and an llms.txt file on this site.

Measuring it

Ask the major assistants the questions your users ask, every month, and track whether (and how) your project is mentioned. A simple manual log is a good start, with the question, the assistant, the date and whether you were named.

For the work after that, see our Web3 SEO & AI Search Optimisation service.