Answer Engine Optimization
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring a website so AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews can understand its content and cite it in their answers.
Traditional SEO aims for a ranking in a list of links. AEO aims for something different: being the source an AI assistant quotes or links to when someone asks a question. The two overlap heavily, since answer engines still crawl the web and favor pages that search engines already trust.
In practice, AEO means writing clear, direct answers near the top of a page, using headings that match real questions, adding schema markup so machines know what each page is about, and keeping facts like your name, location, and services consistent everywhere they appear.
Some sites also publish an llms.txt file that summarizes the site for language models. A glossary like this one helps too, because short, self-contained definitions are easy for an AI tool to extract and attribute.