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You May Not Need A Wikipedia Page To Win At AEO, Could Be Your Website Pages Just Need To Think And Act Like One

Why Wikipedia?

Why Are SEO Experts, AEO Experts, and Digital Marketers Talking About Wikipedia So Much In 2025?

Two key factors for all the marketing and AEO hype related to Wikipedia include:

  • Tests and research completed by SEO and AEO (answer engine optimization) experts indicate that often content from a relevant Wikipedia page is more likely to be served up to individuals using AI, answer, and chat search engines than content from the brand-in-question’s, or company-in-question’s, own website.
  • When AI search engines like chat engines were initially taught to crawl and index information, they were trained to do so using Wikipedia content.

Wikipedia Company Page

How To Set Up A Wikipedia Page and Hurdles To Getting Approved For a Company Page

We’re not going to try to recreate the wheel on this one, since this AEO expert did an outstanding job of explaining the many hoops an organization will likely have to jump thru in order for Wikipedia to approve the posting of a company page on their platform.

How To Set Up A Website Page That Might Perform As Well As A Wikipedia Page When It Comes To Answer Engines

How Can I Set Up Website Pages On My Own Website To Mirror Wikipedia Pages?

If it ends up holding true, and honestly it’s far too early to tell, that structuring/setting up your website page to mirror attributes of a Wikipedia page will cause its content to appear more frequently in answers to relevant questions spit back by AI search/chat/answer engines, then the aforementioned set-up work will have been worth it. But, what does the work entail? To structure a website page so that it mirrors Wikipedia page content that AI search/chat/answer engines seem to adore, we advise the following:

  • Employ various levels of headers, as appropriate to break up, title, and segment/categorize various website page content blocks. Think H1, H2, and H3, as explained in this blog post about the importance of using sub-headers related to SEO and AEO.
  • Throughout website page content, include inner-page and inner-post links to relevant content, particularly content that provides additional information on a term or topic.
  • Reference/give credit to external resources used to inform website page content and link to reputable external sites that might answer additional questions that website page readers might have.

In case you hadn’t noticed, we tried to make this website page/blog post mirror a Wikipedia page to some degree, and since we recently had the good fortune of seeing the musical highlighted in this Wikipedia page at the Huntington Theater In Boston with a friend, we’ll use this page as an example. As you’ll see if you visit this hyperlinked page, the page is really easy to read. No paragraphs are crazy long. The page uses a lot of headers/sub-headers to break up and segment/categorize content. Through reference and external links at the bottom, the page also includes links to creditable resources that provide information on where facts and data contained on the page came from. And, throughout the page, hyperlinks are included to relevant Wikipedia or non-Wikipedia pages that contain further information/explanation on a particular topic/particular data included in the Wikipedia page.

This image is a print screen taken of a Wikipedia page for a musical called "The Light In the Piazza." It shows titles and sub-titles, regular text, bolded text, and hyperlinked text and includes an image with a lot of purple and light yellow in it that shows a young woman and young man on a piazza in Italy with a label on the image that reads "The Light In The Piazza."

How To Write Content That AI Search Engines Like To Crawl And Index

When Google first announced and began rolling out Google SGE, we published a blog post about how to write content for that particular AI search engine. You’ll see that the still appropriate advice provided there is very similar to what was provided above, keep your content clean and make it easily digested and understood by both humans and answer engines!

References and External Links

  1. https://www.semrush.com/blog/generative-engine-optimization/
  2. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/wikipedia-one-platform-you-cant-seo-your-way-beutler-ink-fuwzc/?trackingId=GbMlvVt9SU2fswSkpkGT9g%3D%3D
  3. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/localseoguide_its-friday-so-lets-end-the-week-with-a-activity-7339426222956822528-DGjr?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAFHYEQBT0lx6IRjrP6l3fXO7v_8lhVYZ7g
  4. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/wikipedia-paradox-why-your-business-cant-control-its-most-crawford-axsze/?trackingId=CVy%2FLtPEQMOeLBsEq67cGA%3D%3D
  5. https://www.huntingtontheatre.org/whats-on/the-light-in-the-piazza/

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