For the past few decades, SEO was the name of the game: get indexed by Google, rank on page one, capture the traffic.

But now, the ten blue links are less relevant than ever. Instead, your readers are bringing their questions to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. Those platforms are playing a different game: they either cite you, or they don’t.

Optimizing for those citations is what AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is all about. Similar in theory to SEO, but with entirely new players and rules.

Most platforms make this your problem to figure out. But we aren’t most platforms…

Instead, we solved it for you. Today we're shipping:

🔍️ AEO-Ready Websites
🛡️ AI Crawl Control
🛒 Digital Products (AI Builder)
🤖 beehiiv Agent

Let’s dive in…

AI platforms can’t cite what they can’t parse. They need to know what’s on a page, who wrote it, and whether it’s trustworthy.

So we make it easy: every post now ships a machine-readable summary your readers never see.

It’s called structured data, and it’s the hidden layer that lets Google show richer results and lets ChatGPT confidently say, “this event starts at 7pm.” Every beehiiv post includes this data automatically, with no technical setup or plugins required.

Want more control? You can now add structured data blocks right from the post editor:

That’s it. beehiiv will automatically generate structured data in the preferred JSON-LD format for AI platforms to crawl. And you’re not limited to just one block…

You can stack up to five per post. So if a post includes a tutorial, video, and FAQ, you can make sure AI platforms understand all three.

Of course, none of that matters if AI platforms can’t find the page in the first place. That’s why websites on beehiiv publish with a complete sitemap that covers posts, pages, authors, categories, products, and podcast episodes.

We also create a dynamic llms.txt file from your content. llms.txt is the emerging standard that gives LLMs a clean map of your site and what’s on it. You can customize your own, or put it on autopilot and let us handle it for you.

But discovery is only part of the equation. AI platforms don’t just care what a page says; they want to know who said it. That’s why we made your author identity verifiable.

Author pages now include Person and ProfilePage markup that links to your profile and any social accounts you’ve connected, helping establish who you are and why your content is trustworthy.

And that context doesn’t disappear just because your content sits behind a paywall.

Gated posts now emit proper paywall markup, so AI platforms understand your content is premium instead of penalizing you for hiding it. The result? AI can point people to your paid content without giving it away.

Underneath it all sits the boring stuff that makes the rest work: breadcrumbs, canonical URLs, internal linking, anchor text, Open Graph, rich embeds, and so much more.

Most platforms make this your problem. We made it the default 📈.

AI Crawl Control

Getting discovered shouldn’t mean giving up control.

Last month, AI bots from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft crawled content hosted on beehiiv more than half a billion times 🤯.

That content belongs to you, and you should decide what happens to it.

That’s why we partnered with Cloudflare to build AI Crawl Control, making beehiiv the first content platform that lets publishers decide which AI bots can access their work.

First, visit the Crawler Analytics dashboard to see exactly who’s crawling your content.

Most publishers have never seen this data. For many, it’s the first time they realize that GPTBot has read every post they’ve ever written.

From there, you get to decide what happens next. You have full control over which crawlers can access your website and content, and which ones can’t (e.g., you can block Googlebot while still allowing GPTBot).

And it’s enforced, not requested. Your crawl rules run at the edge on Cloudflare’s network: blocked means blocked.

Digital Products (AI Builder)

We launched Digital Products last November so you could sell eBooks, guides, templates, research reports, webinars, and coaching sessions directly to your audience.

And no matter what you sell, we never take a cent of your revenue. What you earn is yours 😏

Over the past few months, we’ve been quietly expanding what’s possible with Digital Products. We’ve added product reviews, updated product templates, international currency support, and plenty more.

The result?

Hundreds of thousands of product sales, and more revenue for our users (that’s you). But we wanted to make it even easier to go from great idea to first sale…

Now you can simply describe the product you want to launch, and let AI do the work for you. Whether you’re building with the beehiiv MCP or the beehiiv Agent (more on that below), you can launch a new product in minutes:

It’s never been easier to make your first sale.

beehiiv Agent

Out: Copilot
In: beehiiv Agent 😏 

It turns out people really disliked the name “Copilot.” But this update is way bigger than just a rebrand.

The Agent team has been heads down on:

⭐️ Bonus: MCP with the CEO

I recently put together a video showcasing exactly how I use the beehiiv MCP to run my weekly newsletter. It breaks down: