Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

Answer engines — Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, voice assistants — don’t return ten options. They return one answer, maybe with two or three sources cited. AEO is the craft of being the source that gets quoted.

How answers get chosen

Watch what these systems actually cite and patterns emerge fast. They favor pages that put the answer in the first two sentences, not after 400 words of preamble. Specific numbers over vague claims. Clean question-shaped headings. FAQ and Article schema that hands them the Q&A structure pre-parsed. And they consistently prefer sources whose identity is unambiguous — see entity SEO.

The AEO work

• Question mining — the actual questions your customers ask AI, pulled from People Also Ask data, forums and query patterns. Different from classic keyword research, and it feeds it.
• Answer-first rewrites — your key pages restructured so every section leads with its answer. Humans skim happier too; bounce rates usually improve as a side effect.
• Q&A page architecture — dedicated answer pages for high-value questions, each one built to be extraction-friendly, each linking up to your money pages.
• Schema layer — FAQPage and Article markup wired correctly, no duplicates. Handled with schema markup services.

Measuring it

AEO has real metrics: featured snippet captures, AI Overview appearances for your target queries, and citation checks across ChatGPT and Perplexity that we run and report monthly. It compounds with GEO — AEO shapes individual answers, GEO builds the site-wide authority that gets you into the answer pool at all.