SEO, AEO & GEO
What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini — can accurately extract, cite, and recommend it as the answer to a user’s question.
Who Is It For?
AEO is owned by the same teams who run SEO today, extended to account for how AI models find, extract, and cite content differently than traditional crawlers.
How Is It Used?
AEO is used to earn citations and mentions inside AI-generated answers, where there’s often no traditional click-through to a ranked page, protecting and building brand visibility as more search shifts from result lists to direct answers.
- Write clear, directly-answerable content: defined terms, structured Q&A, schema markup
- Build topical and entity authority around a subject so models associate a brand with it
- Seed third-party citations that AI models tend to trust and pull from
- Monitor brand mentions and accuracy across AI platforms
Related Terms & Concepts
Frequently Asked Questions
How is AEO different from traditional SEO?
Traditional SEO optimizes for ranking in a list of links. AEO optimizes for being the answer an AI model extracts and cites directly, which relies more on clear structure, entity authority, and third-party trust signals.
Do I need to choose between SEO and AEO?
No — the two overlap significantly. Strong technical SEO and content structure are foundational to both, and AEO adds citation-focused and AI-specific signals on top.
