Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of making your business easy for AI assistants to find, understand and cite. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude or Google's AI Overviews a question, the engine writes one answer from a handful of sources. AEO is about being one of those sources, and being described correctly when you are.
Why AEO matters now
A search results page shows ten links and lets the buyer choose. An AI answer usually names two or three businesses, or none. If your business is not in that answer, the buyer may never reach the list of links at all. The question is no longer only where you rank, but whether the engine knows you exist and trusts what it knows.
How answer engines choose what to cite
- They can only use pages their crawlers can reach, so blocked or JavaScript-only content is invisible.
- They prefer passages that answer a question directly and make sense on their own.
- They need to be sure which business you are, which comes from consistent names, addresses and profiles across the web.
- They lean heavily on third-party sources: review sites, directories, lists, forums and press.
What AEO work involves
- Crawler access: allow AI crawlers in robots.txt and publish an llms.txt file that summarises your site.
- Structured data: describe your organisation, services, people and articles in schema.org markup.
- Answer-first content: open each key page with a short, plain answer, then expand with question-shaped headings.
- Entity consistency: use the same name, description and details on every profile and directory.
- Off-site presence: earn reviews and mentions on the sites engines draw from.
- Measurement: ask the engines a fixed set of buyer questions each month and record what they say.
Where to start
Start by asking the main AI engines the questions your buyers ask, and write down whether you appear and how you are described. That baseline shows whether your problem is access, content or reputation. The technical fixes are usually quick, while the content and off-site work builds over months, the same way SEO does.
Written by The Adstorm.media Team