AEO
Answer Engine Optimization — optimizing for direct-answer surfaces like AI assistants and voice search.
Full definition
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the discipline of structuring content so that answer engines — voice assistants, AI chat, featured snippets — can extract a clean, quotable answer. It overlaps heavily with GEO but predates it; AEO techniques like FAQ schema and concise opening paragraphs are now table stakes for AI search.
Most AI engines lift answers as paragraphs, not full pages. Pages that follow AEO principles — answer in the first 80 words, FAQ schema for common questions, clean H2 structure — get cited far more often than equivalent pages without that structure.
Example
FAQ schema with question text matching 'how do I cancel my subscription' gets lifted verbatim into ChatGPT and Gemini answers.
Related terms
Generative Engine Optimization — optimizing for citation by AI chat, search, and assistants.
Structured data (usually JSON-LD) that describes a page's content in a machine-readable way.
Schema.org type for marking up question-and-answer content so search and AI engines can extract Q&A pairs.
Search queries spoken to voice assistants (Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant) instead of typed.
Put it into practice
Run a free OptimAIze scan to see how your site handles AEO and the rest of the GEO checklist.
Run free scanFrequently asked questions
Is AEO the same as SEO?
No. AEO is one piece of the broader GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) program that sits on top of classical SEO. The two work together — classical SEO gets you crawled and indexed; AEO is part of what gets you cited by AI engines.
Do I need a tool to implement AEO?
For most teams, a free scanner like OptimAIze is enough to identify what's missing. Implementation is usually a copy-paste of generated markup or a small code change — no specialist tool required.