AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

AEO is optimising content to be the source of a direct answer — in AI results, featured snippets or voice responses — rather than a link the user clicks. In practice it overlaps heavily with GEO.

The formatting discipline is concrete: answer the question in the first 40–60 words, self-contained, before any preamble. Extraction systems lift the first passage that fully answers the query, and a paragraph that depends on the sentence before it can't be lifted.

Specific numbers get extracted more readily than ranges, and dated content gets preferred for anything where recency plausibly matters.

Why it matters

Being the extracted answer wins the mention even when it costs the click — and increasingly the mention is the only thing on offer.

Related terms

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)GEO is the practice of making a business likely to be named and cited in answers generated by AI systems — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, G…Featured SnippetA featured snippet is the boxed answer at the top of some search results, extracted from a page that answers the query directly. It's the classic-sear…Schema Markup (Structured Data)Schema markup is machine-readable code, usually JSON-LD, that states explicitly what a page is about — a service, its price, an FAQ, a business's addr…

More in SEO & AI Search

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)Entity SEO Knowledge Graph sameAs Schema Markup (Structured Data)Speakable llms.txt Information Gain E-E-A-T Topical Authority Internal Linking Crawl Budget Canonical URL Index Bloat NAP Consistency Local Pack Featured Snippet Keyword Research

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