What is AEO?
Answer engine optimisation, optimising your content to be the source cited inside AI-generated answers rather than merely ranked in a list of links.
A worked example
A page that opens with a direct two-sentence answer to the question in its title, uses question-shaped subheadings, states specific figures, and carries valid FAQPage and Organization schema is considerably more likely to be quoted by an AI assistant than an equivalent page written as continuous prose with a slow introduction.
Why it matters
A growing share of research now ends inside a generated answer instead of on a results page. For the businesses affected, this shows up as informational traffic falling while rankings hold steady. The position is still there, the click is not. Being the cited source in that answer is the replacement for the click, and it is worth having.
What AEO changes in practice is emphasis rather than fundamentals. The technical foundation is the same crawlable, fast, well-structured site that good SEO always required. What moves up the priority list is content structure, because models extract passages rather than pages; entity consistency, because a model needs to be confident which organisation you are; specificity, because concrete claims with numbers are more quotable than general ones; and schema, because it removes ambiguity about what your content means.
What moves down, somewhat, is raw link volume. It still signals authority and still matters. It is simply not the dominant factor it is in classical ranking.
The nuance most people miss
Assuming good SEO automatically produces good AEO is the most common error, and it is usually wrong for a specific reason: most well-optimised pages bury the answer. Classical SEO rewarded long introductions, keyword-rich preambles and a slow build to the substance. Answer engines extract the passage that answers the question, and if that passage is 700 words down, a competitor who put it in the first paragraph gets quoted instead. Answering first is the single highest-leverage change most sites can make, and it improves the experience for human readers as well.
Common mistakes
- Assuming existing SEO work automatically delivers AEO results
- Burying the answer beneath a long introduction
- Buying tools or retainers that promise guaranteed AI citations, which nobody can provide
- Blocking AI crawlers in robots.txt by default, then wondering why you are never cited