What does AEO stand for?
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimisation. It is the practice of making a business visible inside the answers that AI assistants generate, rather than only in a list of search results.
Where SEO targets ranking positions on Google, AEO targets being named and linked when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google AI Overviews a question in your category. SEO wins clicks. AEO wins mentions.
Why does AEO matter now?
The behaviour has changed faster than most marketing has. People who once searched "best roofing contractor Manchester" and scanned ten blue links now ask an assistant the same question in plain language and get three names back with a short justification for each.
Two things follow from that. First, the businesses named in those answers capture the enquiry before any comparison shopping happens. Second, a recommendation from an assistant arrives with implied endorsement — it does not read like an advert, because it is not one.
The businesses being named today are largely the ones whose content happened to be structured in a way models could parse. Doing that deliberately is the entire discipline.
How do AI assistants decide who to name?
AI assistants build answers from a mix of what they learned during training and what they retrieve live from the web. When deciding which businesses to name, four signals dominate:
- Structured data. Schema markup that states plainly who you are, what you sell, where you operate and what you charge, so the model does not have to infer it.
- Extractable content. Passages that answer a question completely on their own. A model cannot quote a paragraph that only makes sense after reading the two above it.
- Entity consistency. The same business name, description and address everywhere you appear online. Contradictions lower the model's confidence in every claim about you.
- Third-party citations. Presence in the independent sources models draw from — directories, review platforms, forums, trade press. This carries the most weight and happens entirely off your own website.
Is AEO different from SEO?
AEO and SEO overlap but are not the same. They share technical foundations — a site must be crawlable, fast and well structured for either to work — and strong organic rankings make AI citation more likely, because assistants disproportionately draw from pages that already rank well.
The difference is in the content. SEO copy is written to attract a click and keep someone reading. AEO copy is written to be extracted and quoted, then discarded. A page can rank first on Google and never be cited by an assistant, because nothing on it stands alone as an answer.
In practice, most businesses should treat AEO as an extension of SEO rather than a replacement for it.
What about GEO?
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation, and describes the same goal from a different angle. AEO emphasises structuring content so it can be extracted as a direct answer. GEO emphasises influencing what generative models say about a brand.
In practice the terms are used interchangeably and the underlying work is identical. Do not let an agency charge you separately for both.
How do you measure AEO?
AEO is measured by share of answer: how often your brand is named when AI assistants are asked buying-intent questions in your category.
The method is straightforward. Fix a set of around twenty prompts a real customer might ask. Run them monthly across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Record three things each time — whether your brand appears, how it is described, and which competitors appear instead. Keep the prompt set fixed so the numbers stay comparable.
Alongside that, watch referral traffic from AI platforms in your analytics. It is usually small in volume and unusually high in intent.
How do you start with AEO?
Four steps, in order:
- Baseline first. Ask the assistants the questions your customers ask. Write down what comes back. You cannot improve a number you have never measured.
- Fix your structured data. Organisation, service and FAQ schema, connected properly rather than scattered across separate blocks.
- Rewrite your key pages as answers. Take the twenty questions customers actually ask and answer each one completely, in its own self-contained passage.
- Build third-party presence. Directories, review platforms and industry publications, with consistent details everywhere. Slowest, and the one that matters most.