Most AEO advice starts with content. When I review a site, I start lower in the stack.
What does the crawler receive? Is the useful information in the HTML? Can a machine tell which company and product the page is about? Only after those checks do I look at how the answer is written.
I work on FixAEO, so I spend a lot of time thinking about why one brand appears in an AI answer while another does not. There is no single switch that controls this. In practice, the problems are usually spread across access, page structure, entity data, content, and measurement.
This is the order I use when checking them.
The short version: Make the right pages easy to fetch, put the important information in reliable HTML, describe your entities accurately, answer specific questions, and track mentions separately from citations. Add llms.txt if it helps agents navigate your site, but do not treat it as a shortcut.
