What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?
AI & Answer Engines — answered straight, by an operator who builds these systems rather than an agency selling them.
Answer engine optimization is the work of getting your business named and cited when someone asks an AI assistant a question — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, or Google AI Overviews. It overlaps with SEO but optimizes for being quoted in an answer rather than clicked in a list.
The longer version
The mechanical difference is format. A search engine ranks documents and shows ten of them. An answer engine reads documents, extracts a claim, and states it as fact — usually with two or three citations. Pages structured as long persuasive essays get skipped. Pages that state a clear fact in a clear sentence, with the entity named, get lifted.
In practice AEO is four things: content restructured so each page answers one question directly near the top; schema markup that tells the model what your business is, where it works, and what it charges for; consistent business facts across every source a model might read; and machine-readable access — a clean sitemap, an llms.txt, and no accidental blocking of AI crawlers.
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