AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring web content so AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews quote it directly as the answer to a user question.
AEO is to AI answer engines what SEO is to Google search results. The goal shifts from ranking in the top ten links to being the single quoted answer an AI assistant returns.
Effective AEO combines: (1) question-style headings that mirror how users phrase prompts, (2) short, declarative standalone paragraphs that LLMs can lift without rewriting, (3) heavy schema.org markup — FAQPage, HowTo, DefinedTerm, Article — that explicitly labels the content type, (4) entity-dense writing that names brands, products, and concepts rather than using pronouns, and (5) a crawlable, fast-loading site so AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended) can index you in the first place.
AEO and SEO share infrastructure but diverge on format. Depth and keyword density still matter for SEO; concise answer fragments and schema matter more for AEO. Both can be true for the same page — and usually are, when the writing is done with both crawlers in mind.