What this white paper is
The AEO Standard is iSimplifyMe's 100-point scoring system for Answer Engine Optimization — the discipline of structuring content so AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude can extract, cite, and recommend it. This page offers the print-ready PDF edition of the standard; the living document, with its changelog and current revision, is openly published at the standard's canonical home in the Lab.
The PDF exists for the ways paper still wins: sharing with a team, annotating in review, and reading the whole rubric end to end without a browser. The content matches the web edition at the version printed on its cover.
What's inside
The white paper carries the complete standard, not a summary. In fourteen pages of reading you get:
- The two gating rules — hidden machine-only content and fabricated authority — that reject a page outright, regardless of its point total.
- All seven scoring sections with point values: Substance & Originality (25), RAG/Retrieval Readiness (20), Atomic Answer Blocks (15), Structured Data & Schema (10), Semantic HTML & Headings (10), Internal Linking & Fan-Out (10), and SEO Meta & Technical (10) — every check marked mechanical or judgment.
- The atomic answer block specification — the 40–60-word, self-contained, visible answer format that answer engines can lift and cite.
- Verdict thresholds and the scorecard format a conforming scorer reports.
- The common failure patterns we see most across production audits, in rough order of frequency.
- The versioning policy and license — CC BY 4.0, versioned like software, so a score always references a specific revision.
Who it's for
The standard is written for the people who have to make citation-worthiness operational: content leads deciding what "publishable" means, technical SEOs adapting to answer engines, and the engineers wiring quality gates into a publishing pipeline. If a generic model could have written your page, no amount of markup will make it citable — the standard scores both halves and says so plainly.
How to use it
Score something. The fastest way to understand the rubric is to watch it grade a page you care about: the free AEO scanner runs any URL in the browser, and the aeo-scan CLI preview on npm checks the core mechanical signals from a terminal. When the gap between your score and the publish threshold looks like architecture rather than copyediting, that is the work we do.