What is Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)?

AEO in one line

Optimise so that when someone asks an AI engine a question your business should answer, the engine names you, links you, and trusts you enough to repeat what you say.

Buyers increasingly get one synthesised answer instead of ten blue links. AEO is the work of being inside that answer rather than on a page nobody scrolls to.

Why AEO is not SEO

SEO earns a position on a results page a person scrolls. AEO earns a mention inside a synthesised answer a person reads instead of scrolling.

The buyer often never sees a list now. They see one answer with a few cited sources. If you are not one of those sources, you are not in the conversation, no matter how well you rank.

Where AEO plays

Four surfaces carry most of the buyer intent worth winning:

• ChatGPT: the default first stop for a growing share of buyers, and the surface most likely to shape a shortlist before any site is visited.
• Google AI Overviews: the AI answer above the classic results, governed for AI use by the Google-Extended crawler.
• Perplexity: an answer engine that cites its sources inline by design, so a citation there is visible and clickable.
• Gemini: Google's assistant, grounded in the same signals as Overviews.

What the engines weigh

AEO is not a trick. It is making a business legible and trustworthy to a machine:

• Answer-first content: the answer stated plainly, near the top, in the words a buyer would actually use.
• Structured data (schema): JSON-LD that tells the engine what a page is, who you are, and how the facts relate.
• Entity clarity: one consistent description of who you are across your site and every off-site profile, so the engine is sure it is dealing with a single business.
• Corroboration: being named alongside known players in third-party sources the engine already trusts.

How you know you have an AEO problem

• You rank fine on Google, but you never appear when you ask ChatGPT or Perplexity the question your best customer would ask.
• Competitors keep getting named in AI answers and you do not.
• Your site reads well to people and badly to machines: no schema, answers buried below the fold, an unclear description of what you actually do.
• International buyers cannot get an answer about you in their own language.

How to fix it

Start with measurement, not a rebuild. An AEO audit scores where you are and are not cited today, benchmarks the competitors who are, and returns the schema and content plan to close the gap. From there the fixes are concrete: answer-first pages, per-page JSON-LD, a clean entity model, and off-site corroboration.

A concrete example

A Bangkok clinic ranks on page one of Google for 'hair transplant Bangkok'. Ask ChatGPT 'where should I get a hair transplant in Bangkok?' and it names three other clinics, not them. The ranking is intact; the citation is missing. That gap, between ranking and being named, is exactly what AEO closes.