AE-200 · Flagship
Earns Certified Answer Engineer
A 12-lesson course by Sophyx for GEO and AEO engineers. For marketers, SEOs and founders who already know some SEO and have heard of AI search. Every lesson compares the old era of search (ten blue links) with the new era (one AI answer that names a few brands), then shows what to do about it. Ends with the Certified Answer Engineer certificate of completion.
Free account. Your progress saves as you go.
What you will be able to do
Module 1
Understand it: how AI search differs from classic search, how an answer is made, and what carries over from SEO.
Module 2
Technical: make sure AI can load your pages, read your facts and quote your content.
Module 3
Off-site: keep your facts consistent everywhere, earn mentions from others, and keep everything fresh.
Module 4
Operate it: research prompts, measure what wins, and run the answer engineer's loop.
Syllabus
Lessons run 2 to 3 minutes. Each has captions, a transcript, key terms, a practice quiz and a short exercise for your own business.
Lesson 01
From ten blue links to one answer
Classic search crawled, indexed and ranked pages; a person compared ten links and clicked one. AI search fans a full question out into several searches, keeps the passages that answer it, adds what the model learned in training, and writes one answer that names a few businesses. The decision moved from your website (after the click) into the answer (before it). SEO still matters, but ranking is no longer the finish line.
Lesson 02
How an AI answer is made
An assistant answers from two places: what the model learned in training (frozen at a cutoff date) and what it retrieves live. With retrieval, it interprets the prompt, fans it out into searches, pulls pages, splits them into passages, keeps the passages that answer the question, writes a grounded answer and sometimes cites its sources. Passages, not whole pages, are the unit AI works with, and being mentioned is not the same as being cited.
Lesson 03
SEO, GEO and AEO: what carries over
Much of SEO carries over, with a new meaning. Keywords become prompts. Backlinks become mentions and agreement across many sources. Ranking position becomes share of answer: how often you are named for the prompts that matter. Click-through rate becomes AI referral visits. Crawlability, quality content, clear site structure and authority still form the foundation.
Lesson 04
Can AI load you?
Before AI can mention you, its crawlers must load your pages. robots.txt decides which crawlers may fetch which paths. Many AI crawlers read the raw HTML and do not run JavaScript, so content that appears only after scripts run may be invisible. Login walls, errors, slow responses and blocked bots stop them too. Some controls are separate: for example, OpenAI lists GPTBot (training) and OAI-SearchBot (search) separately, and Google-Extended governs use for Gemini, not Google Search.
Lesson 05
Speak machine
Make your facts easy for machines to read. Write key facts in plain text on the page. Add schema.org structured data (usually JSON-LD) for your organisation, locations, products, prices, hours and FAQs, and keep it in sync with the visible page. Publish discovery files such as llms.txt and brand.json that point AI to your most important pages and facts. They are emerging conventions and support varies, so they add to plain, consistent facts and do not replace them.
Lesson 06
Answer-shaped content
Write so that any passage can be lifted out and still make sense. Use real questions as headings, put the direct answer in the first one or two sentences, then add detail. Name the subject in each section, include specifics (prices, places, numbers, steps), and use comparison tables, lists and FAQs. Show who wrote it and when it was updated.
Lesson 07
Your digital footprint
AI learns about you from everywhere your brand appears: your website, business profiles, directories, review sites, social profiles, marketplaces, Wikidata and more. Keep the core facts identical everywhere: name, address, phone, hours, prices, categories and descriptions. Connect your official profiles to your site with sameAs links in your structured data.
Lesson 08
Many voices
AI trusts agreement. What others say about you, in reviews, social media posts, local news, best-of lists, comparison articles and videos, often matters as much as your own site. Find which third-party sources assistants cite for your prompts, earn honest mentions there, respond to reviews, and correct errors with the publisher. Never buy or fake reviews.
Lesson 09
Fresh or forgotten
Stale pages fade, and stale facts get repeated. Watch for answers that give old hours, prices or features, or that are wrong outright (hallucinations). Run a correction workflow: find where the wrong fact comes from, fix it at the source and on your site, update structured data and profiles, then re-check the answers. Review key fact pages on a schedule and whenever something changes.
Lesson 10
Prompts, not keywords
Buyers ask long, specific questions. Build a prompt set from real customer language: sales calls, support tickets, reviews, forums and on-site search. Group prompts by intent (discover, compare, decide), persona and location. Track the same prompts across several assistants, because each can answer differently.
Lesson 11
Measure what wins
Measure the whole chain: are you mentioned, are you cited, is the answer accurate, do AI crawlers read your pages (server logs), and do people arrive from AI answers (referrals in analytics) and convert? Rank prompts by what their pages actually earned. A prompt can win without being cited, and a cited prompt can bring no one. Visits beat mentions.
Lesson 12
The answer engineer's loop
Put it all together as a loop: audit (prompts, answers, loadability, footprint), fix (the highest-impact problems first), publish (answer-shaped pages and corrected facts), measure (mentions, citations, crawler reads, visits) and double down on what wins. Run it on a steady cadence. The capstone project runs one full loop.
How you earn it
Four questions after each lesson. Try as often as you like: every wrong answer explains why it is wrong. Get 3 of 4 right to finish the lesson.
30 questions about situations at different businesses, 45 minutes, pass at 80%. Everyone gets their own mix of questions. 24 hours between attempts, up to 3 in 30 days.
Pick a brand: your own, a client (with permission), or the fictional Larkspur Dental pack. Deliver a short report (slides or doc) covering the five parts below. Graded pass or fail against the rubric; every part must pass.
The certificate
It carries your name, a unique credential ID and a public page where anyone can check it. Add it to LinkedIn in one click, or download it as a PDF. Valid for 12 months, because AI search changes fast.
A Sophyx credential, not an accredited qualification.
This certifies that
has earned the credential
Certified Answer Engineer
AE-200 · The Answer Engineer · awarded for completing 12 lessons, the final exam and the final project.
Prerequisites: basic SEO (what crawling, indexing and ranking are) and some hands-on use of an AI assistant. All brands in examples are fictional; all numbers are illustrative.
