KhaqanWhat is AEO (answer engine optimisation)?
Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the practice of structuring web content so that answer engines, meaning AI assistants, voice assistants and featured snippets, can extract a direct, accurate answer to a question and attribute it to your site.
Traditional SEO aims to get a page ranked in a list of links. AEO aims to get a passage chosen as the answer. The engine might be a chat assistant, a voice assistant reading one result aloud, or Google's featured snippet and People Also Ask boxes. In every case the engine wants a question, a short self-contained answer near it, and enough surrounding context to trust the source.
In practice that means writing headings as the questions customers ask, answering each in the first sentence or two beneath the heading, using lists and tables where the answer is a set of steps or options, and marking up genuine FAQs with FAQPage structured data. It also means being specific: a page that says a service is available in two named cities with a stated response time gives an engine something to quote, while a page that says the service is available across the region gives it nothing.
For a business running an ERP or a services website, AEO is mostly a matter of putting facts you already know into a shape a machine can lift. An example is a laundry company whose page on collection areas lists each area under a heading of its own; an assistant asked whether the company collects from a given area can answer yes and cite the page.
The common mistake is writing a question heading and then burying the answer three paragraphs later, after the marketing copy. The audit tool I published, ai-visibility-audit, scores this layer separately from classic SEO precisely because sites pass one and fail the other.
Related terms
- GEO (generative engine optimisation): Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the practice of making a website easy for generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini to crawl, understand and cite, so that the site appears as a source in AI-generated answers.
- FAQPage schema: FAQPage schema is a schema.org structured data type that marks up a page's questions and answers as a list of Question items, each with an acceptedAnswer, so search engines and AI assistants can identify the exact answer text to a specific question.
- AI Overviews (Google): AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries Google shows at the top of some search results, built by its Gemini models from pages in Google's index, with links to the sources it used; they launched in 2024 and now appear for many queries.
- speakable schema: Speakable schema is a schema.org property (speakable, with a SpeakableSpecification) that points, using CSS selectors or XPath, to the sections of a page best suited to being read aloud by a voice assistant, typically the headline and a short summary.