Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

Answer engine optimization is about making a specific question, like who should I call for a slab leak, easy for an AI system to answer with your business's name attached. That means writing pages that state facts plainly (your service area, your pricing, your licensing) rather than burying them in marketing copy a model has to work harder to parse.

The name comes from answer engine, the umbrella term for AI systems that answer a question directly instead of returning a page of links. You'll also hear this called GEO (generative engine optimization) and LLMO (large language model optimization). These terms describe the same practice and the industry hasn't converged on one label, so don't treat the distinction as meaningful.

AEO differs from classic SEO because the target isn't a ranking position, it's a mention inside a generated answer. Ahrefs found that only 12% of AI-cited URLs also rank in Google's top 10 for the original prompt, with the rate varying by engine: Perplexity cited pages ranking in the top 10 about 28.6% of the time, Copilot 8.6%, Gemini 8.2%, and ChatGPT about 8%. Ranking well and getting cited are two different jobs.

AEO work does not include buying schema.org markup as a citation guarantee. Microsoft's Fabrice Canel has said schema helps Bing's LLMs understand content, but the one empirical test that looked for a link between schema coverage and LLM citation rates found none. Structured, plainly stated facts on the page itself matter more than markup around them.