Answer engine optimization for Medicare agencies
Medicare AEO Agency: Get Cited by ChatGPT, Google AI and Perplexity
Ask ChatGPT for a Medicare agent in your county. If it names a national call center instead of you, that is a page problem, not a marketing budget problem. We build the pages, schema and callable tools that make a Medicare agency the source AI engines cite, inside CMS marketing rules.
From $247/month, published pricing below
A Medicare AEO agency makes your website one of the sources an AI engine names when a shopper in your market asks a Medicare question. That takes four things: answer pages written for the exact questions people ask, structured data (schema markup) the engines can parse, open access for the AI crawlers, and plan-year-current figures. Strategic AI Architects does all four for Medicare agencies and runs the same stack on its own Medicare sites. It was founded by Mike Moore, a licensed health and life producer.
AEO, GEO (generative engine optimization) and AI SEO describe the same work. We use AEO because the engines are answering a question, and the question is what you have to win.
What the engines say today when someone asks for a Medicare agent
We probe ChatGPT and Perplexity every week with the questions real Medicare shoppers ask in one market, Sioux Falls and Minnehaha County, South Dakota, and record every domain the answers cite. This is who got named between August 19 and October 1, 2026, ranked by citation count.
A national call-center lead aggregator, cited 245 times across 20 questions. It has never set foot in Minnehaha County.
A national Medicare directory, 181 citations. It lists agents and sells the leads back to them.
A second national agent directory, 159 citations. Same model: list the agents, sell the leads.
Medicare.gov, 126 citations. The right source for rules, and the one you want to be quoted beside, not replaced by.
A map listings site, 123 citations. Engines fall back to directories when no local agency has an answer page.
One independent Sioux Falls Medicare agency, our own build, appeared with 16 citations. Every other local agency: zero.
Source: Strategic AI Architects AI Visibility tracker, 20 Medicare questions for Sioux Falls and Minnehaha County SD, probed in ChatGPT and Perplexity, August 19 to October 1, 2026. Cited domains are described by type rather than named; the exported tracker rows, with domains, are available on request.
Why Medicare is the hardest vertical to get cited in
The answer has to be compliant, current and local at the same time
Medicare Advantage enrollment was projected at 34 million people for 2026, roughly 48 percent of everyone on Medicare, according to CMS. Every one of them can now ask an AI which plan and which agent. Three things make Medicare different from every other insurance line an AEO agency might work in.
CMS marketing rules changed on October 1, 2026
The TPMO disclaimer (the Third-Party Marketing Organization notice CMS requires on Medicare marketing) now has to appear before any plan benefits are discussed, not within the first minute. Call recordings are retained six years instead of ten. The 48-hour Scope of Appointment wait (the gap between a beneficiary signing the scope form and the sales meeting) is gone. All three changes are in the CMS Contract Year 2027 final rule, Federal Register, April 6, 2026, effective October 1, 2026. An AI rewrite that drops the disclaimer or quotes the old rule fails review, and we have watched generic AI content do exactly that. Our Medicare answer pages are written against the Federal Register text, with the disclaimer where CMS put it.
Read the rule breakdowns: call recording, scope of appointment, TPMO disclaimer.Plan-year data goes stale on a schedule
CMS has already published the 2027 landscape fact sheets. A Medicare page that still quotes 2026 plan counts, premiums or star ratings during this AEP is wrong to every engine that reads it, and engines prefer the source with the current number. Our pages pull plan counts, premiums and star ratings straight from the CMS landscape, enrollment and star-rating files through our own data engine, so they roll over when CMS does.
Example: 10.6 million MA members are in plans rated below 4 stars, built from the CY2026 landscape file joined to the March 2026 CMS enrollment file, with both sources linked in that post.The question is always local
"Medicare agent near me," "best Medicare Advantage plans in Harris County," "turning 65 in Pasadena, what do I do." The engines resolve those to a county or a city, then look for a source that answers at that level. National directories win by default because almost no local agency has a county-level answer page. One such page, correctly structured, is enough to appear beside Medicare.gov in the answer.
How we build them: location pages that earn citations.What we build
The Medicare AEO build, component by component
This is the same stack we run on our own Medicare sites. Every component below is one we run on our own sites and one the free audit checks on yours.
Answer pages for the questions your county actually asks
One question per page, the answer in the first two sentences, a named and dated source for every figure, the TPMO disclaimer where the CMS rule requires it. Turning 65, Advantage versus Medigap, Part D help, "is my doctor covered," enrollment periods, all written for your county, not a template with the city swapped.
Four pieces of structured data an engine can verify
Four pieces of structured data on every page. Article or Service schema with organization-level authorship (who published this). FAQPage schema for every question block (what questions it answers). Dataset schema, a machine-readable label naming the CMS dataset a figure came from with its exact URL (where the number is from). And llms.txt plus WebMCP, covered below (how a machine reads and uses the site). Together they let an engine confirm what the page is, who stands behind it, and where the numbers came from.
Open the door to AI crawlers, then tell them where to look
We check robots.txt and the firewall for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and Bingbot, fix the managed rules that block them silently, and publish an llms.txt, a plain-text index at your site's root that tells AI crawlers which pages answer which questions. A blocked crawler zeroes out everything else, which is why the free audit checks it first.
Which AI crawlers to allow · What llms.txt isWebMCP: a plan finder an AI agent can call
WebMCP is a published list of tools on your site that an AI agent can run, not just read: a manifest at /.well-known/mcp.json and an /mcp endpoint that expose your plan finder and quote request as callable functions. We run this in production on our own sites, including this one.
What WebMCP isPlan-year freshness, straight from the CMS files
Plan counts, premiums, star ratings and enrollment for your counties come from the CMS landscape and enrollment files and update when CMS publishes. Your 2027 figures appear when the 2027 landscape drops, not when someone remembers to edit the page.
The speed floor every citation depends on
We ran PageSpeed on 1,080 insurance agency websites and found a median mobile score of 61. Our builds measure 99 to 100 on mobile, because a page that fails Core Web Vitals is a page the engines deprioritize before they read a word.
The 1,080-site study · What score an agency site needsHIPAA-safe tracking on every quote form
Medicare quote forms collect health-adjacent data. We wire Meta and Google tracking server-side and consent-gated, so you can measure what the AI traffic does without a pixel firing on a Medicare form.
Meta pixel on a Medicare quote formA monthly citation report you can read in a minute
Which questions we probed, which engines named you, which domains got cited instead, and what we are building next because of it. The same tracker that produced the numbers on this page.
Medicare AEO vs Medicare SEO
Most vendors sell one and call it the other. Here is what each actually does, so you can tell which one you are buying.
| What matters | Medicare SEO | Medicare AEO |
|---|---|---|
| What you compete for | A position among ten blue links | One sentence inside the AI answer, plus the citation beside it |
| Unit of content | A keyword-targeted page | A question answered completely in the first two sentences |
| Structured data | Optional, often skipped | Required: Article or Service, FAQPage, Dataset, organization authorship |
| Crawler access | Googlebot only | GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Bingbot |
| Freshness | Update when you remember | Plan-year figures roll over with the CMS files |
| Compliance | Not the vendor's problem | TPMO placement and dated sources are part of the build |
| Machine access | None | llms.txt and a callable WebMCP tool |
| How you measure it | Rank tracking | Citation tracking across engines, plus Search Console and Bing conversational queries |
The foundation is shared: fast pages, clean HTML, real content. SEO still matters, and our builds rank. AEO is what makes the same page citable.
Pricing
Every tier includes the Medicare AEO build. Here is what each adds.
Month to month, cancel any month by email, no cancellation fee, 14-day free trial, and the $997 setup fee is currently waived. The pages, schema, crawler access, llms.txt, WebMCP and freshness described above are in every tier. Pro and Scale add the weekly content that compounds it.
Website
The AI-ready Medicare website on its own. Or $840 a year billed annually.
- ✓ Complete, compliant site with every Medicare educational and offer page
- ✓ Full schema set, llms.txt, AI crawler access
- ✓ 10 county and city location pages, calculators, CRM webhook
- ✓ Website MCP, figures kept current from the CMS and HealthCare.gov files
- ✓ 14-day free trial, cancel anytime
Starter
The foundation. Upgrade to Pro anytime.
- ✓ Everything in Website
- ✓ Google Business Profile management and review harvesting
- ✓ AI chat widget
- ✓ Monthly AI citation report
- ✓ Setup free (limited), 14-day free trial
Pro
The complete done-for-you system.
- ✓ Everything in Starter
- ✓ 1 new Medicare answer post and 1 new location page every week
- ✓ 24/7 AI receptionist that follows the TPMO and recording rules
- ✓ Setup free (limited), 14-day free trial
Scale
The same system, publishing more. One bill.
- ✓ Everything in Pro
- ✓ 1 new post every business day (20 to 22 a month)
- ✓ 2 new location pages every week
- ✓ Setup free (limited), 14-day free trial
Not sure which tier fits your book? Book a 30-minute call with Mike and bring your current site. We will look at it together in the engines.
How the first 30 days go
Audit of your current site in all four engines, crawler access fixed, your counties and carrier lineup collected. Site live.
County answer pages, full schema set and llms.txt published. Google Business Profile and reviews connected.
WebMCP plan finder live. First weekly post and location page out (Pro and Scale). Trial ends, billing only if you want to continue.
First citation report: which questions name you, which do not yet, and what we build next because of it.
Your build is led by Mike Moore, founder of Strategic AI Architects. He is a licensed health and life producer who grew his own ACA book past $1 million a year as a personal producer, and today runs two Medicare agency sites built on this exact stack, Big Sioux Benefits in Sioux Falls and Mere Benefits in Jacksonville.
Questions Medicare agencies ask about AEO
What is a Medicare AEO agency?
Is Medicare AEO different from Medicare SEO?
How long does it take for a Medicare agency to get cited by AI engines?
Can a page be cited by AI and still pass a CMS marketing review?
What does Medicare AEO cost?
Do we need to let ChatGPT and Perplexity crawl our Medicare website?
What do you need from us to start?
What happens if the engines still do not name us after 90 days?
What is WebMCP and why does a Medicare site need it?
Talk it through
Book a call with Mike
Free 30 minutes. Bring your current site. We will ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI for a Medicare agent in your county together and see who they name, then decide what to fix first.
Your county's Medicare questions are being answered right now. Make sure the answer names you.
Every component on this page, running on your site, from $247 a month. Start with the free audit if you want to see where you stand first.
Sources on this page: CMS, "Medicare Advantage and Medicare Prescription Drug Programs Expected to Remain Stable in 2026," press release, September 26, 2025 (34 million projected MA enrollees, about 48 percent of beneficiaries). CMS CY2027 Medicare Advantage and Part D landscape state-by-state fact sheets, September 2026. Strategic AI Architects, "We Ran PageSpeed on 1,080 Insurance Agency Websites," August 2026. Strategic AI Architects AI Visibility tracker, window as stated. Other Medicare AEO guides: the long-form Medicare and health AEO guide, ACA and health insurance AEO, all AI search services.