Answer Engine Optimisation
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of making a brand discoverable, accurately described, and frequently cited by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews.
Why it matters
AI assistants are increasingly the front door to brand discovery — if you're missing from the answer, you're missing from the consideration set. AEO is how marketing teams measure and improve that visibility, separate from traditional Google ranking work.
How it differs from SEO
Traditional SEO optimises pages for ranking on Google's results page. AEO optimises for being cited inside an AI answer — answer engines synthesise a response from multiple sources, so visibility means showing up in the synthesis, not at position one.
The signals overlap (authority, freshness, structured data) but the mechanics diverge: AI answer engines reward extractable content, primary-source citations, factual statistics, and structured markup that disambiguates entities.
What it measures
- Citation frequency — how often the brand is mentioned across a defined prompt set.
- Share of voice — the brand's mention rate vs competitors for the same prompts.
- Sentiment and accuracy — how the brand is described, and whether the description matches reality.
- Source domains — which pages AI engines actually quote when answering.
Common pitfalls
Treating AEO as a re-skin of SEO misses the point. The biggest gains come from publishable, citable content with clear provenance — original data, named experts, dated claims — not keyword optimisation. Stuffing AI keywords actively reduces visibility (Princeton GEO research).
Related terms
