Answer engine optimization (AEO)
The practice of making a brand easy for AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews to find, understand, mention and cite.
AEO is SEO's sibling for a world where the answer arrives before the click. Search engines rank pages. Answer engines write a response, name a few brands and link a few sources. AEO is the work of being one of them.
What AEO covers
- Access. Let the right AI crawlers in, and make sure your firewall agrees.
- Content. Publish answer-first pages that state facts plainly and cover the follow-up questions.
- Authority. Earn mentions on the third-party pages engines cite: reviews, comparisons, community threads, press.
- Clarity. Describe your company the same way everywhere, on your site, your profiles and in structured data.
- Measurement. Track real prompts across engines and watch mentions, position, citations and sentiment.
How AEO differs from SEO
The fundamentals overlap: crawlable pages, useful content, real authority. Google's own guidance says optimizing for its AI features is still SEO. The difference is the scoreboard. There's no position 1 to own. There's a sentence where your brand appears or doesn't, and the answer changes from run to run. That's why AEO is measured over many prompts and many runs, not one keyword ranking.
Somewhere, right now, an AI is recommending your client's competitor.
Elite Answers is invite-only. Request access through Elite Digital and the team will set you up.