Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of engineering web content, structured data, and entity signals so that generative answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Claude — retrieve, cite, and correctly attribute a specific source.
Where classic SEO optimizes for a ranked list of blue links, AEO optimizes for inclusion inside a synthesized answer. The unit of success shifts from "position 1" to "cited by name" — a URL that appears in the model's grounded sources with the correct organization and author attached.
The practice draws on documented specs, not folklore: schema.org vocabularies (QAPage, Article, Organization, Person), Google's guidance on structured data and AI features, and the IndexNow protocol used by Bing and, transitively, ChatGPT Search.
A working AEO stack ships four things at once: crawlable server-rendered HTML with the answer as its own quotable sentence, JSON-LD that names the answer and its author entity with sameAs links to authoritative profiles, a canonical URL that never moves, and a fast discovery loop (sitemap, IndexNow ping) so new answers reach the index the same day.
AEO does not replace SEO — it extends it. The same crawlability, canonicalization, and E-E-A-T signals that help Google rank a page also help an answer engine pick it as a source.