25 AEO quick wins you can do this week, grouped by how long they take.

AEO sounds like a big project, but much of it is a list of small fixes that remove reasons for AI to skip you. Can the AI search crawlers reach your site? Are your basic facts the same everywhere? Do your pages answer the questions buyers ask, in plain words? These 25 quick wins are grouped by the time they take. Do the first group today, and the rest across the week.

Five minutes each: access and checks

1. Check your robots.txt for AI search bots. OpenAI says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Make sure it, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, Bingbot and Googlebot are not blocked.
2. Decide on training bots separately. GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended control training (and, for Google-Extended, Gemini grounding), not search. Blocking them is a policy choice, not an AEO fix.
3. Add your sitemap to robots.txt with a Sitemap: line, so every crawler can find it.
4. Search for noindex and nosnippet by accident. Google says a page must be indexed and eligible for a snippet to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode.
5. Ask ChatGPT and Google AI Mode about your business by name. Note what is wrong or missing. That is your fix list for the week.

Our free robots.txt tester (no signup) shows whether each AI crawler can reach a URL and which rule decides, and the AI robots.txt generator writes a corrected file.

Fifteen to thirty minutes: your business facts

6. Complete every Google Business Profile field you can: categories, services, service area, hours and description. Google says complete, accurate profiles are more likely to show in local results.
7. Set special hours for holidays, so AI and Maps do not give out wrong ones.
8. Reply to your last ten reviews. Google says replying shows you value feedback. Be specific, never defensive.
9. Add fresh photos of your work, team and premises to your profile.
10. Make name, address and phone identical on your website, Google, Bing Places, Apple Maps, Yelp and your industry directories. Inconsistent facts give AI conflicting sources.
11. Put your key facts on the About page in plain sentences: founded year, owner, service area, licenses, number of locations.
12. Link your social profiles from your site footer, and your site from each profile.

About an hour: answers AI can quote

13. Write five FAQ answers to questions customers actually ask, each starting with a direct one or two sentence answer.
14. Add a price or price range to service pages, or explain what drives the price. Cost questions are among the most common.
15. Put the answer first on your top three pages: the first paragraph should say what you do, for whom and where.
16. Add a comparison section: "repair vs replace", "us vs a national chain", with honest trade-offs. AI Mode handles these complex comparisons.
17. Replace vague claims with facts: "500 roofs since 2015" beats "years of experience", if it is true.
18. Shorten your longest sentences. Plain-English answers are easier to quote. The free readability checker finds them.
19. Name your service areas in text, not only on a map image.

An afternoon: structured data and technical

20. Add Organization or LocalBusiness schema with name, address, phone, hours and sameAs links, matching what the page shows. Our free schema markup generator writes it for you.
21. Validate it in Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator.
22. Check that main content loads without JavaScript. View the page source: if your answers are not in the HTML, some crawlers will not see them.
23. Set up Bing Webmaster Tools and look at the AI Performance report for citations in Copilot and Bing's AI summaries.
24. Turn on IndexNow (many CMS plugins support it) so Bing hears about changes quickly.
25. Add an llms.txt file if it is easy for you (our llms.txt generator makes one). It is an emerging proposal, and Google says it is not needed for its AI features, so treat it as optional.

A few things that are not quick wins

Some advice sounds quick but is not worth your week:

• FAQ schema for rich results. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in May 2026. Write the FAQ answers anyway; they help readers and AI.
• Buying or gating reviews. The FTC's rule bans fake reviews and testimonials. Ask every customer instead.
• Rewriting everything with AI. Bland copy does not earn citations; specific facts do.

If you want the list ordered for your own site, a free AEO Armory audit checks 9 readiness areas across up to 15 pages and ranks the fixes by impact and effort, with ready-to-paste text.

Frequently asked questions

What is the fastest AEO fix?

Checking robots.txt. If OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or other AI search crawlers are blocked, those assistants cannot cite your pages, and fixing it takes minutes.

Does blocking GPTBot stop ChatGPT recommending me?

GPTBot is OpenAI's training crawler. ChatGPT search uses OAI-SearchBot, so what matters for search answers is whether OAI-SearchBot is allowed.

Do I need llms.txt for AEO?

No. It is an optional proposal, and Google says no special AI text files are needed for AI Overviews or AI Mode. It does no harm if it is easy to add.

How long until quick wins show up in AI answers?

OpenAI says robots.txt changes take about 24 hours to register for its search systems. Content changes depend on recrawling, which can take days to weeks.