What is answer engine optimisation (AEO)?
Answer engine optimisation is the practice of structuring content so AI assistants quote it directly when answering a question. Where SEO competes for a position in a list of links, AEO competes to be the source inside the answer itself — in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.
Why it matters now
A growing share of buying research never reaches a results page. Someone asks an assistant which supplier to use, and acts on the answer. If your business is not in the material those systems draw on, you are not in the consideration set at all.
The mechanics are not mysterious. Assistants favour content that states a claim plainly, is easy to attribute, and is corroborated elsewhere.
What actually works
- Answer the question in the first paragraph, in 40 to 60 words, with no preamble.
- Use one page per question rather than burying ten answers in a blog post.
- Mark up FAQs, services, and your organisation with correct schema.org structured data.
- Keep facts specific and dated. Vague copy is unquotable.
- Be consistent everywhere — your name, address and phone number should match across your site, Google Business Profile and directories.
- Allow AI crawlers in robots.txt. Many sites block them by accident.
How AEO and SEO fit together
They are not alternatives. The technical foundation is shared: fast, crawlable, well-structured pages. AEO adds a writing discipline on top of it.
A site that does both ranks in the traditional results and gets cited in the generated answer above them.