Answer engine optimisation, or AEO, is the work of making your content easy for AI tools like ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews to find, understand and quote back to people. If you've come across the term and you're wondering whether it's a whole new thing you need to start paying for, then the chances are you're already doing most of it as long as your SEO is in decent shape. That's a less exciting answer than most AEO articles will give you, so I've leaned on what Google itself has published and tried to be clear about the handful of parts that really are new.
What Answer Engine Optimisation Means
Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is about structuring your content so AI tools and answer-first search features, such as Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and voice assistants, can find it, understand it and cite it directly. It started with featured snippets and voice search, long before ChatGPT came along.
For as long as I've been doing SEO the goal has been to get a page ranking and get it clicked, and with answer engine optimization (as you'll more often see it spelt) you're hoping your page ends up as one of the sources an AI answer is built from. That might be a passage in an AI Overview, a link in a ChatGPT reply or the snippet a voice assistant reads out. It's worth caring about because of how many people now see these answers, and at I/O this year Google said AI Overviews now has over 2.5 billion monthly active users, with AI Mode passing a billion in its first year.
You'll also see generative engine optimisation, or GEO, used for pretty much the same thing, and the two get swapped around so often that there's no settled line between them. I've gone into that in a separate post on what GEO is.
Do You Need AEO if You Already Do SEO?
Generally speaking, no, not as a separate discipline. The way I look at it, AEO is mostly just good SEO, as I'm still optimising your site for what people are searching for and it's only the way they're searching that has changed. A lot of good SEO carries over to AI search and then there are a few specific AI bits that fall outside traditional SEO, such as query fan-out.
Someone might ask ChatGPT a full question these days where they'd once have typed a few keywords into Google, but the work that gets a page chosen hasn't changed much. It still needs a clear structure, content written by someone who knows what they're talking about, pages that search engines can actually crawl (the bread and butter of technical SEO) and a site people have good reason to trust, and that's the same list I've always worked from with SEO.
Google itself says much the same thing. In its guide to optimising for generative AI features on Google Search, Google says "you don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search (including its generative AI capabilities)". It also says that structured data isn't required and there's no special schema.org markup to add, and that creating an llms.txt file for other services "will neither harm nor help" your visibility in Google Search. The reason it gives is that its AI features are "rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems", so the things that help you rank are doing most of the work there too. So if someone offers to sort out your AEO with an llms.txt file and a bundle of new schema, bear in mind that Google hasn't asked for either.
Query fan-out is the clearest of those AI-specific bits, and it's where an AI tool takes one question and splits it into several related searches in the background before it writes an answer. I've explained how that works properly in my post on query fan-out.
If you're reading this and thinking it sounds mostly like an SEO problem then I'd agree with you, and my SEO services are where I'd start.
How Answer Engine Optimisation Differs From Traditional SEO
Most AEO guides say traditional SEO has been about ranking for shorter, keyword-heavy searches and winning the click, whereas AEO is about being part of the answer itself, often for the longer, conversational questions people type into ChatGPT or ask their phone.
That change does matter, as fewer people click through when the answer is already sitting on the page. Pew Research tracked the browsing of 900 US adults and found that people who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits, against 15% when no summary appeared, so being one of the sources the answer is built from counts for more than it used to.
What it doesn't change much is how you write the page. If each section opens with a clear, direct answer and then goes into the detail, it works for someone scanning the page, for Google ranking it and for an AI tool lifting a passage out of it. I try to write this way anyway and it's how I've laid out this post. There's a full side-by-side comparison in my post on SEO vs AEO vs GEO.
The Small Number of Things That Are Genuinely Different
Query fan-out is the biggest of the genuinely new bits, because it changes what ranking for a keyword even means. If an AI tool is running several related searches in the background and pulling from all of them, your page might get picked up for a sub-question you never targeted, or missed on the main one you did. AI Mode's fan-out can also log impressions in Search Console that never turn into clicks, so I don't get too excited by a jump in impressions with no clicks to match. I go through the mechanics in more detail in my query fan-out post.
Being cited has also drifted a long way from ranking. Vendor research from Ahrefs, reported by Search Engine Journal, looked at 863,000 keywords and found only 38% of AI Overview citations came from pages in the top 10, down from 76% in its earlier study. Ahrefs put part of that drop down to better detection on its side and part to fan-out, and other studies have landed on different figures, so I'd treat it as a direction of travel and wouldn't hang too much on the exact number.
AI tools also don't all pick their sources in the same way. Google's AI Overviews are built on Google's own search index so they tend to stay closer to its normal rankings, but ChatGPT and Perplexity don't share that index, and some research from SEO tool vendors suggests they lean more on third-party and community sources such as Wikipedia, review sites and Reddit threads. None of that research comes from Google or OpenAI, so I'd take the detail with a pinch of salt.
My own work has shown me how little you can take for granted here. When I ran a ChatGPT citation test for a London storage company in August, it wasn't cited on any of the eight location queries it was targeting, while a competitor with around 236 referring domains was. That's why I'd never assume being cited in one AI tool means you'll show up in another, and why I look at where else a business gets mentioned as well as where its own pages rank.
Getting Help With AI Visibility
If you'd like a second opinion on whether your current SEO already covers this, or some help with the AI-specific parts, I offer AI SEO services as an extension of my SEO work, covering ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. If you'd rather start by seeing where you stand, I also run an AI visibility audit as a one-off project, and if you're an agency I'm happy to do either white label.
Like all of my projects it starts with a free discovery call, so drop me a message and we can have a chat about what you're looking to achieve. Nobody can honestly promise you a citation, me included, but I can help you work out what's worth doing and what your SEO is already covering.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Does AEO Stand For?
AEO stands for answer engine optimisation, which you'll also see spelt answer engine optimization. It's about structuring your content so AI tools and answer-first search features, like Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity, can find it, understand it and cite it directly when they answer someone's question.
Is AEO Different From SEO?
Not really. Answer engine optimisation relies on the same work as good SEO, which is clear, trustworthy, well-structured content on pages that search engines can crawl. What's changed is where that work gets used, as people now ask AI tools questions directly as well as typing keywords into a search box.
Do I Need to Do Anything Differently for AI Search if My SEO Is Already Solid?
Mostly no. Google says you don't need special AI text files, markup or schema for its AI features, as they're rooted in its core ranking systems. The things worth knowing about are query fan-out and the way different AI tools pick their sources in different ways, and I've gone into both in more depth elsewhere on this site.
Does Ranking Well on Google Mean AI Tools Like ChatGPT Will Cite Me Too?
Not necessarily. Google's AI Overviews draw on Google's own search index, so strong rankings help there. ChatGPT and Perplexity don't share that index, and some research from SEO tool vendors suggests they lean more on third-party and community sources, such as review sites, Wikipedia and Reddit threads. Being cited in one AI tool doesn't guarantee you'll be cited in another.
What's the Single Most Important Thing for AI Visibility?
There isn't really one silver bullet. Generally speaking, a clear, honest, well-structured page that already ranks decently is doing most of the work, and mentions of your business on other trusted sites, plus a layout that makes answers easy to lift, help with the rest. Nobody can guarantee a citation, so I'd be wary of anyone who promises you one.
