Guide
What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)? A plain-English guide for business owners
Your customers are asking AI tools who to hire. Here's what AEO is, why it matters, and what you can do about it without falling for guarantees nobody can keep.
By Gawker Traffic Team · 5 min read
For twenty years, getting found online meant ranking on Google. That's still important. But a growing number of buyers now start somewhere else: they ask ChatGPT, Google's AI answers, Perplexity or another assistant a question and read the answer it writes.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the work of making your business easy for those tools to understand, trust and reference.
AEO in one sentence
AEO makes sure that when someone asks an AI tool a question your business can answer, the tool has clear, consistent and credible information about you to draw from.
How is AEO different from SEO?
SEO focuses on earning a position in a list of search results. AEO focuses on being understood and cited inside a generated answer. They overlap heavily: a fast, well-structured website with genuinely helpful content supports both.
What actually helps
- Clear service definitions — say plainly what you do, for whom, and where.
- Direct answers to real questions, written in natural language (FAQs work well).
- Structured data (schema markup) that labels your business, services and content.
- Consistent business information across your website, profiles and directories.
- Credible signals: published expertise, press coverage, reviews and named authors.
What to be skeptical of
No one controls what an AI model says. Any agency promising guaranteed placement or recommendations inside ChatGPT is overselling. What you can do is improve the clarity, consistency and authority of your information — which improves your chances of being understood and cited.
Where to start
Ask a few AI tools the questions your customers ask. Note whether you appear, how you're described, and who appears instead. That snapshot is the starting point for any AEO plan.
FAQ