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What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?
21 August 20265 min read
AEO is the work of making your brand the answer AI search engines extract and cite. Here is what it means and what it involves.
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content, entities and technical signals so AI-powered answer engines — Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT search and similar — understand, trust and surface your brand as the answer to a question, not just rank it as a result.
What 'answer engine' means
An answer engine takes a question and returns a synthesised answer, often citing its sources. It doesn't show a list of links and leave you to click. The goal of AEO is to be the answer it extracts and the source it names.
How AEO differs from SEO
SEO targets a position in a ranked list of links. AEO targets being the answer an engine extracts and cites. The fundamentals overlap — technical health, authority and clear content — but AEO adds entity clarity, schema markup and question-led structure that a machine can parse without ambiguity.
What AEO involves
Content built to answer a specific question directly. Entity clarity — who you are, what you do, where you operate. Schema markup engines can parse. Authoritative, citable sourcing. And technical accessibility so crawlers and bots can reach it.
What it doesn't promise
No agency controls what an answer engine surfaces. AEO is the structural work that makes being cited more likely, made measurable over time — not a guarantee of any single placement.
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