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Defined Term

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of engineering content, structured data, and entity signals so that generative answer engines retrieve and cite a specific source.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of engineering content, structured data, and entity signals so that generative answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude — retrieve and cite a specific source.

Where SEO optimizes for ranked search results, AEO optimizes for inclusion inside a synthesized answer. It relies on the same crawl foundation as SEO — canonicalization, sitemap discovery, helpful content — plus a heavier emphasis on machine-readable answer markup (QAPage, FAQPage, Article) and a fully-linked entity graph.

See our full explainer at What is AEO?

Related answers

  • What is AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)?

    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.

  • What's the difference between AEO and SEO?

    SEO ranks a page in a list of results; AEO gets the page cited inside a synthesized answer — same crawl foundation, different measurement, different structured-data emphasis, and a different set of engines that decide who wins.

  • What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)?

    Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of shaping content so large-language-model answer engines quote it verbatim inside their generated responses — a sibling discipline to AEO that focuses on the phrasing, structure, and evidence patterns that models prefer to lift.

  • How do AI assistants choose which sources to cite?

    Grounded AI assistants choose sources by running a retrieval query against a search index, ranking the returned pages using traditional relevance and authority signals, and then having the model select the passages it can quote with the highest attribution confidence.

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