Answer Engine Optimisation is the work of getting your business quoted in the answers that AI tools like Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity hand back, rather than only ranking in the old list of blue links.
For twenty years, search meant a list of links. You optimised to rank in that list, someone clicked, and they landed on your site. AI-powered answer engines have changed the shape of that. Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and the rest increasingly read the web, synthesise an answer, and present it directly, often without the person ever clicking through to a source.
AEO is the practice of making sure your business is one of the sources those systems draw on and name. It is not a replacement for SEO. It builds on the same foundations, clean structure, clear writing, credible sourcing, and adds the specific signals an answer engine needs to read your content confidently and cite it. Where technical SEO makes a page easy for a crawler to index, AEO makes the facts on it easy for a language model to lift and attribute.
In practice that means well-formed structured data, content organised around real questions and direct answers, strong E-E-A-T signals, and increasingly an llms.txt file, though that one is still unproven: Google's own Search Relations team has said its crawlers do not use it, so treat it as a low-cost experiment rather than something that moves the needle yet. It overlaps heavily with GEO, the two terms describe much the same work from slightly different angles.
Key points
- AEO is about being cited in AI answers, not just ranking in the list of links below them.
- It builds on SEO rather than replacing it: the same foundations, plus signals AI systems can read.
- The main levers are structured data, question-and-answer content, and E-E-A-T; an llms.txt file is worth adding but no major AI crawler has confirmed it reads one yet.
- It matters more as a growing share of searches end in an AI answer the user never clicks past.
- AEO and GEO describe largely the same work; the distinction is mostly which engine you have in mind.
Frequently asked questions
Common questions about answer engine optimisation.
They overlap far more than the acronyms suggest. SEO gets you ranking in search results; AEO gets you quoted in the AI-generated answer that increasingly sits above those results. AEO is not a separate discipline you bolt on, it is SEO done with answer engines in mind, with extra care on structured data and clear, quotable answers. If your SEO foundations are weak, AEO has nothing to build on. I treat them as one job, which is why my SEO service covers both.
Ranking well is a strong start, but it measures the old game. If a growing share of your audience gets their answer from an AI Overview or asks ChatGPT directly, a page-one ranking nobody scrolls to see is worth less than it used to be. AEO is about making sure that when those systems answer the question your customers ask, your business is the source they reach for. I wrote a plain-English piece on what AI search is doing to traffic if you want the fuller picture.
It is harder to measure than a keyword ranking, and anyone promising a tidy dashboard is overselling it. The honest signals are: appearing as a named source in AI Overviews for your key questions, referral visits arriving from ChatGPT and Perplexity, and your business being described accurately when you ask those tools about your area. It is early and the measurement is imperfect. I would rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.
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