Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring your content so AI assistants and answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google's AI overviews — can find, understand, and cite it when answering a user's question. Where classic SEO competes for a ranked list of links, AEO competes to be the source an AI quotes when there's only one answer given.

The tactics overlap with good SEO but skew harder toward machine readability: direct answers in the first sentence, question-shaped headings, FAQ and HowTo structured data, definitional pages for the terms you want to own, and files like llms.txt that hand crawlers a clean map of your site. For a small business the practical takeaway is simple: write pages that answer one question each, clearly, near the top — because increasingly the "search result" is a sentence, and you want it to be yours.