# Agent Engine Optimisation MOC Agent Engine Optimisation makes a brand easy for AI systems to find, cite, trust and act on. State as of October 2026. > [!abstract] The thesis in four lines > - Discovery moves from ten blue links to one synthesised answer. > - The answer engine is becoming an agent that reads, compares and buys. > - A brand now needs two things: to be **in the answer**, and to be **usable by the agent**. > - The money so far sits in measurement. The bigger prize sits in agent infrastructure and commerce rails. ## 1 · Basics - [[Agent Engine Optimisation]]: definitions, the SEO → GEO → AEO shift, and the three jobs (be found, be cited, be usable). - [[What Drives AI Citations]]: what the evidence says, and what is still vendor folklore. ## 2 · State of the art - [[Agent-Ready Web Stack]]: Markdown for agents, llms.txt, WebMCP, Web Bot Auth, pay per crawl. - [[Agentic Commerce Protocols]]: ACP, UCP, AP2, Visa TAP, Mastercard Agent Pay. ## 3 · Companies - [[AEO Company Landscape]]: a short list of the companies that matter, by layer. - [[Peec AI]]: evaluation of the Berlin visibility tracker. > [!tip] Where the value goes (my read) > - **Measurement** (Peec, Profound) won the first wave. It is now commoditising. Ahrefs and Semrush bundle it. > - **Action** (content agents, agent-facing pages) is the second wave. Profound, AirOps and Scrunch all moved here in 2026. > - **Rails** (Cloudflare, Parallel, Exa, Stripe, Google, Shopify) own the pipes agents use. These are the durable positions. ## 4 · Build - [[AEO Tool Build Prompt]]: shareable prompt for an audit tool. One URL in, ranked fixes and ready-to-ship files out. ## 5 · Open questions - Prompt tracking samples synthetic prompts. Real answers change with memory, location and personalisation. How valid is a "visibility score"? - ChatGPT ads went live in February 2026. Does paid placement shrink the organic AEO budget, like Google Ads did to SEO? - AI referrals are about 1% of web traffic. Does AEO justify budget before agent checkout scales? - Will one commerce protocol win, or will merchants support UCP and ACP side by side? - Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers by default. Does a pay-to-crawl web reduce citations for brands that charge? ## Related - [[Agent Harnesses and Agentic Search]] - [[Conversational Commerce]] - [[Connector Layer and MCP]] - [[CLI vs MCP]] - [[Marketing]] - [[AI Deployment Layer MOC]] - [[Context Layers MOC]] ---- tags: #ai #AIstrategy links: [[Maps of Content (MOCs)]] [[AI agents]]