What is AEO?
Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of structuring your website and content so that AI systems - large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, as well as Google's AI Overview - can understand it clearly enough to summarise, reference, or directly cite it in response to someone's question.
Where traditional search returns a list of links for a person to click through, an answer engine reads multiple sources, synthesises them, and gives the person a direct answer, sometimes with a citation, sometimes without. AEO is about maximising the chance that your business is one of the sources it draws from. If you'd like a closer look at where your own site currently stands, our SEO & AEO Visibility service covers this in more depth.
How does AEO differ from SEO?
SEO and AEO share a lot of the same foundations - both care about clear structure, authority, and relevance. But they optimise for different endpoints:
- SEO optimises for ranking in a list of links a human will scan and choose from.
- AEO optimises for being selected, understood, and cited by a model that's writing an answer on someone's behalf.
In practice, this means AEO puts extra weight on things SEO treats as secondary: direct question-and-answer phrasing, unambiguous factual statements, clear structured data (schema markup), and content that can be lifted and summarised without losing meaning.
Where AI visibility actually shows up
AI-driven answers aren't limited to one platform. The main places worth understanding:
- ChatGPT - increasingly used for research and recommendations, including business and service lookups
- Google Gemini - Google's own conversational AI, separate from traditional search
- Perplexity - built specifically as an answer engine, citing sources directly in its responses
- Google AI Overview - the AI-generated summary now appearing above traditional results on many Google searches
Each has slightly different behaviour in what it cites and how, but the underlying groundwork - clarity, structure, and credibility - helps across all of them.
How to increase your AI search visibility
A few foundational steps, roughly in order of impact:
- Answer questions directly. Structure content around the actual questions your audience asks, and answer them plainly near the top of the page, before adding nuance or context.
- Use clear headings. Question-style headings ("What is...", "How does...") help both readers and models quickly identify what a section covers.
- Add structured data (schema markup). This gives AI systems explicit, machine-readable facts about your content, rather than making them infer everything from prose.
- Keep facts consistent across your site. Contradictory or vague information across pages makes it harder for a model to trust and cite you confidently.
- Earn genuine mentions elsewhere. AI models draw on the wider web's view of your business, not just your own site, so credible external mentions still matter.
A note on common mistakes
The most common misstep is treating AEO as a checklist to "trick" a model into citing you, rather than genuinely making your content clearer and more useful. Models are trained to prioritise accuracy and helpfulness, the same qualities that make content genuinely good for a human reader are, largely, what make it good for AEO too.