What is AEO?
Answer-engine optimisation: making a page easy for AI assistants and answer engines to read, trust and quote. Where SEO is about earning a place in a list of links, AEO is about being a page an answer can be built from, with your name on it.
What an answer engine is
An answer engine answers a question directly — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews — instead of handing you a list of links. To do that it fetches pages, reads a little of each, and lifts the passages that answer the question. Most of them read the HTML your server sends and never run your JavaScript, so anything that isn't in that HTML simply isn't there to them.
GEO and AEO
Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is another name for much the same work. The term comes from a 2023 research paper, later published at KDD 2024, that measured how changes to a page changed how visible it was in the answers generative engines wrote.
Some people draw a line between optimising for AI search and optimising for chat assistants; in practice the page that serves one serves the other. We say AEO, and when you read GEO elsewhere it means the same thing here.
AEO vs SEO
They overlap more than they differ. Everything an answer engine needs, a search engine needed first: a page it's allowed to fetch, HTML it can read, a clear topic. AEO adds what matters when a machine quotes you rather than links to you.
| Question | SEO | AEO |
|---|---|---|
| Who reads the page | Search crawlers, then a person choosing a link | AI crawlers and assistants, then a person reading an answer |
| What the machine is after | A page to rank for a query | A passage to quote, and a source to name |
| What the page needs | To be crawlable, indexable and clearly about something | All of that, plus answers in the raw HTML, self-contained sections and a clear author |
Being honest about it
Nobody can promise you'll be quoted. Which pages an answer engine picks is its decision, and it changes. What a page can control is whether a machine is let in, can read it, can tell what each part is about and can tell who said it. That part is measurable, and it's what our checks look at.
Checks that measure it
Related terms
Not sure where yours stands?
A free scan checks your page the way an answer engine reads it, in about 20 seconds — no signup.
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