What is AEO?
Also called: Answer engine optimisation, Answer engine optimization
The short answer
AEO, answer engine optimisation, is structuring a website so AI assistants and search features quote it as the answer, not just list it as a link.
What people say: “showing up in ChatGPT”, “getting AI to recommend my business”.
AEO, explained
Answer engines, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews, read pages, extract facts and cite sources. AEO makes that extraction easy and trustworthy: answer the question first in one clear sentence, name entities precisely, mark up facts with structured data and keep claims verifiable.
It builds on SEO rather than replacing it; AI systems still discover pages through crawling and still favour authoritative sources.
Questions people ask about AEO
What is AEO?
AEO, answer engine optimisation, is structuring a website so AI assistants and search features quote it as the answer, not just list it as a link.
How do I get my business mentioned by ChatGPT?
Publish clear, factual pages that answer the questions customers ask, keep your business details consistent across the web, earn mentions on trusted sites, and make sure AI crawlers are allowed to read your site.
What is the difference between SEO and AEO?
SEO aims to rank a page in a list of links; AEO aims to have your content quoted as the answer itself. The same fundamentals serve both.
Related terms
GEO, generative engine optimisation, is optimising content to be included and cited in answers written by generative AI systems.
AI OverviewsAI Overviews are Google's AI-generated summaries at the top of some search results, which answer the query directly and link to the sources used.
Answer-first contentAnswer-first content puts the direct answer to the page's question in the opening sentence, then adds detail, so readers and AI systems get the point immediately.
EntityAn entity is a uniquely identifiable thing, such as a person, business, product, place or concept, that search engines and AI systems store facts about.
Structured dataStructured data is code, usually JSON-LD using the Schema.org vocabulary, that labels what a page describes, such as a product, business, FAQ or article, for search engines and AI.
llms.txtllms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at a site's root that gives AI models a concise, curated guide to the site's most important content and links.
Part of the Web Encyclopedia by Apex Flow Digital. Definitions are general knowledge, kept current, with no invented statistics.