Publishing It Yourself: How to Ship Each AEO Change
Publishing our recommendations yourself? This routes you to the exact guide for each task — llms.txt, schema, content and citations — plus developer briefs.
Publishing it yourself
If you chose to publish the changes we recommend rather than have us do it, this is your starting point. Every task on your board that needs a change to your website links to the specific guide for that job — so you are never reading general advice and guessing which part applies to you. This page explains the four kinds of work you will be asked to do, which of them are genuinely quick, and where the traps are.
The four jobs, and how hard each one really is
In rough order of effort: publishing a page of content is the biggest job and the most valuable, because content is what gets quoted. Adding llms.txt is a single static file and takes minutes once you know where your site's root folder is. Adding structured data is either a plugin settings screen or a developer request, depending on your platform. Building citations is the most repetitive — a list of listings to claim by hand — but needs no technical skill at all. None of them require you to write code, and only the last one is time-consuming rather than difficult.
The three rules that apply to everything
First, the facts must match. Your website, your structured data, your llms.txt and your directory listings all describe one business, and any disagreement between them is worse than a missing signal. Take the facts from your onboarding record rather than from memory. Second, use your editor's real heading styles for headings rather than making text bigger and bolder, because only one of those produces structure a machine can read. Third, verify on the live page, not in the editor — previews are usually hidden from crawlers and the editor shows you what it looks like, not what it produces.
If you have a developer
Several of these jobs are a few minutes for somebody who already has access to the server, and the fastest path is often to forward the task rather than learn it yourself. Each guide below ends with a numbered brief you can copy and send. Send the whole brief rather than a summary — the acceptance test in it is what stops a change bouncing back and forth, and the note about not duplicating existing schema is what stops the work doing more harm than good.
If you would rather we did it
You can switch at any time, per task. Reply on the task card saying you would rather we handle it — you will be asked for the access we need and the work goes back into our queue. There is no penalty for changing your mind, and it is the right call when a card has been sitting because it depends on someone else's availability; a card that cannot move is a score that cannot move either.
What we still do either way
Whichever you choose, we continue to do the work that needs our own tooling: running your visibility scans across the AI platforms, measuring whether the changes actually moved your answers, generating the structured data itself, writing the content, and reporting what changed and what it did. Self-publishing changes who puts the finished piece on your site. It does not change what we produce for you or how we measure it.
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