What is AEO?
AEO stands for answer engine optimisation. It's the work of making your content the answer a tool gives when someone asks a question, rather than one result among many.
An answer engine is anything that replies with an answer instead of a page of links. Google's featured snippets were the first big one. Voice assistants followed, reading out a single answer. Now ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews write answers from the pages they read, and name or link the sources.
The idea is simple. If a tool is going to give one answer, you want it to be yours, in your words, with your business named.
Where did answer engine optimisation come from?
The term was in use before ChatGPT, when the main answer engines were featured snippets and voice assistants. AI assistants have made it matter far more.
Back then, the aim was the box at the top of Google, or the one answer a smart speaker read out. The habits that won those spots, clear questions and short, direct answers, are the same ones AI tools quote today.
What's changed is the kind of question. Assistants now answer longer, buying questions, such as "which accountant in Leicester handles small limited companies?". That brings businesses, not just publishers, into the game.
What does an answer engine look for?
It looks for a passage that answers the question clearly, on a page it can read and trust. Five things make a passage easy to pick.
- A heading that matches the question people actually ask.
- A first sentence that answers it, with no run-up.
- Specific facts: prices, timings, places, steps and names.
- A format that suits the question: a list for steps, a table for comparisons, a short paragraph for a definition.
- Plain text in the HTML, not in images, PDFs or tabs that need a click.
How do you do AEO, step by step?
These are the eight steps we work through. The first four are about the questions. The rest make your answers easy to find and trust.
- List the questions your buyers ask, from sales calls, emails, Search Console, People Also Ask boxes and the assistants themselves.
- Group them, and give each main question one page or one section. Don't answer the same question on five pages.
- Use the question, or something close to it, as the heading.
- Answer it in the first one or two sentences. Then give the detail, the exceptions and the proof.
- Add facts that can be checked: a "from" price, a typical timeline, the areas you cover and what's included.
- Add Organization, Service and FAQ structured data that matches the words on the page.
- Make sure Googlebot, Bingbot and AI crawlers can read the page, with the key copy in the static HTML.
- Track it: check which questions show your answer in Google, and run the same questions in the main assistants every month.
What does a good AEO answer look like?
It's short, specific and complete on its own. Someone should be able to read that one sentence and have their answer.
Take the question "how long does a website take?". A weak answer: "Every project is different, so timelines vary depending on your needs." A strong one: "Our websites take 5 days on average, from kick-off to live." The second can be quoted. The first can't, because it says nothing.
That's the whole test. If a sentence still makes sense when it's lifted out of the page and dropped into an answer, it's ready.
Is AEO the same as GEO?
Very nearly. AEO is about being the direct answer to a question. GEO covers being cited or recommended in AI-written answers more broadly.
The work overlaps almost completely, and you'll see both used alongside AI SEO and LLM SEO. Our GEO guide covers the research behind it and the wider job of earning mentions on other sites.
How long does AEO take to work?
There's no fixed timeline. A clearer answer on a page that already ranks can be picked up as soon as Google crawls it again. New pages in a competitive market take months.
BidScript, a UK bid management software company, went from about 10 to about 400 Google AI answers a day in 3 months. The work behind it was clear facts, comparison pages, structured data and digital PR.