"Answer Engine Optimization" is the new gold rush: get your site cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. There is an entire cottage industry selling advice on how — add schema markup, publish more pages, buy a tool.
I run a small bilingual Chinese-astrology calculator (auspiceoracle.com). It's about as niche and low-authority as a site gets, which makes it a decent lab rat: zero brand signal, zero backlinks, nothing to confound the measurement. Before writing a single content page I did two things most AEO advice skips — I read the actual studies, and I set up measurement before launch. Here's what survived contact with the data.
Finding 1: schema markup is not an AEO lever
This one hurt, because adding JSON-LD is the single most-repeated piece of AEO advice.
The best evidence available is an Ahrefs difference-in-differences study: 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD, each matched to 3 control URLs on other domains at similar pre-period citation levels, 30-day windows, four statistical approaches. Result:
