AEO cites you. 402 pays you.

AEO and GEO raise the chance that an answer engine uses your content and that more search/answer crawlers request your HTML. That can raise how many agents read you on the visits you already have. They are not charging. 402 is.

What each term is

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) aims at snippets, AI Overviews, and direct answers. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) aims at being cited inside generated text. In practice vendors treat them as almost the same stack: schema, markdown, llms.txt, AI search bots. The GEO paper (KDD 2024) reports up to +40% visibility in a controlled experiment. That is not +40% income.

Three different currencies

• Training (GPTBot, Google-Extended): they copy the corpus. Cloudflare measured ~80% of AI crawl in 2025. Almost nobody pays you for that unless there is a contract.
• AI search / citations (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ai-input): they can cite you. Similarweb and Pew saw more zero-click and lower CTR when an AI Overview is present. Being cited loses less than not being cited. It does not replace lost traffic.
• Agents that pay: 402 + crawler-price (Cloudflare Pay per Crawl, private beta since July 2025) or x402. Real infrastructure. Market volume not published yet.

Do not use “half of traffic is bots”

Imperva counts scrapers, monitoring, and bad bots. That is not paying agents. Cloudflare puts AI crawl useful for answers far below that total, and almost all AI crawl is training. ChargeReady’s estimate is narrower: chargeable crawlers on HTML, not “half the internet”.

How it enters the score

Schema, AI search robots, and content signals make the site more citable. They raise the number a bit. Without 402, crawler-price, or x402, charging stays at zero and the level does not pass “they read you, they do not pay you”.

Better AEO/GEO usually means more answer crawlers, not more training. Without charging, the range is opportunity. The report shows the calculation. The actionable guide comes from the scan, not this generic page: measure the site and open “AEO/GEO guide for this site”.

How to charge agents · How the score works

Sources: Cloudflare Pay per Crawl, Content Signals, crawlers vs clicks, GEO paper, Pew AI Overviews.