What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?
How optimizing for AI answer engines differs from classic SEO — and where to start.
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of making your business easy for AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google’s AI answers — to understand, trust, and cite. Where classic SEO optimizes for ranking a page in a list of blue links, AEO optimizes for being the source an AI model references when it composes an answer.
The shift matters because more of the buying journey now happens inside AI answers, before anyone visits a website. If an AI engine can’t clearly parse who you are, what you do, and why you’re credible, it will summarize a competitor instead.
Getting started is less about keywords and more about clarity: structured data, clean page hierarchy, complete answers to real questions, consistent business information, and authoritative signals the models can verify. Fix those, and you become the easy, safe answer for an AI to surface.