What Is Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)?

Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so it can be directly extracted and cited by AI-generated answers - Google's AI Overviews, voice assistants, and chat-based search - rather than only ranking as a blue link.

Traditional SEO optimises for a ranking position. AEO optimises for being the source of the answer itself, which means a growing share of visibility comes from queries that never produce a click at all.

In practice, AEO relies on the same technical foundation as good SEO, pushed further: clear, direct answers near the top of a page, FAQ and HowTo schema markup, and content structured in a way that's easy for a model to extract cleanly - short, unambiguous statements rather than answers buried in marketing language.