What is AEO?
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AEO — Answer Engine Optimization — is making your business the source an AI assistant quotes. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, or Google's AI Overviews for a plumber in their town or what a website should cost, something gets named. AEO is the work that makes it you.
Why it changed
Search used to hand you ten links and let you choose. Increasingly it hands you one answer, assembled from a handful of sources, with a citation or two underneath. If you're not one of those sources, the customer never sees you — and there's no page two to be on. That's the whole shift, and it's why "rank higher" is no longer the only goal worth having.
The six things that matter
Answer the question in the first sentence
Assistants lift the first clear, self-contained sentence that answers the question. Not background, not a story about the founding of your company — the answer, then the detail.
Write in questions and answers
Headings phrased the way people ask ('How much does X cost?') and answers short enough to quote whole. Sixty words is a good ceiling.
Mark it up so machines are certain
Structured data tells an assistant which text is the question, which is the answer, what your hours are, and what you charge — no guessing from layout.
Say the same thing everywhere
Name, address, phone, hours, and prices must match across your site, your Google Business Profile, and every directory. Contradictions make an assistant hedge or skip you.
Let the crawlers in
AI assistants use named crawlers. If your site blocks them — deliberately or by accident — you're invisible to that assistant no matter how good your content is.
Be quoted elsewhere
Assistants weight sources they already trust. Reviews, local press, industry directories, and genuine mentions carry your facts into places the model already reads.
What this looks like on our own site
We practise it here, which is the only honest way to sell it. Our answers hub holds forty short, quotable answers with their own anchor links and question-and-answer markup. Our prices, hours, and turnaround live in a single machine-readable fact block so every page repeats identical numbers. And we publish a plain-text summary for AI crawlers at /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt, the second one carrying the answers inline so an assistant that fetches one file leaves with facts rather than a to-do list.
SEO vs AEO vs GEO
| SEO | AEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank in a list of links | Be cited as the source of an answer | Have your words used inside the answer |
| Win looks like | Position and a click | Your name in the citation | The sentence is built from your facts |
| Main lever | Crawlability, links, keywords | Question-shaped headings, structured data | Quotes, sources, real numbers, plain writing |
| Measured by | Rankings and traffic | Citations in AI answers | Whether your phrasing appears |
The three stack rather than compete. If you want the writing layer on top of this one, read what GEO is.
Common questions
What is AEO?
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization: making your business the source AI assistants quote when someone asks a question. Where SEO competes for a link in a list, AEO competes to be the sentence the assistant reads out.
What's the difference between SEO and AEO?
SEO earns a ranking; AEO earns a citation. SEO optimizes for a page that gets clicked, AEO optimizes for a passage that gets quoted. They overlap heavily — an assistant can't cite a page it can't crawl — but AEO cares more about clear, self-contained answers.
Does AEO replace SEO?
No. Search still sends most traffic to most small businesses. AEO is an additional layer that protects you as more people ask an assistant instead of typing a query — and almost everything it asks for makes your site clearer for humans too.
How do I know if AI assistants mention my business?
Ask them. Type your industry and city into ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI mode as a customer would, and see who gets named. Do it monthly — the answers change, and so does who's cited in them.
What matters most for AEO?
Clear question-shaped headings, short self-contained answers, structured data, consistent business facts everywhere you appear online, an accessible site AI crawlers aren't blocked from, and being mentioned on sources those assistants already trust.
How long does AEO take to work?
Weeks to months. Assistants refresh their view of the web on their own schedule, and some read live while others rely on a training snapshot. Consistency across your site and listings speeds it up more than any single change.