Key takeaways
- AEO (answer engine optimisation) means shaping your content and brand information so answer engines (AI assistants, AI Overviews, featured snippets, voice assistants) quote or recommend you.
- It started with featured snippets and voice search. Today it overlaps almost completely with GEO, and US searches for "what is aeo" nearly doubled in a year.
- AEO builds on SEO: answer engines draw on pages that are crawlable, clear and trusted.
- The practical work: answer real questions plainly, add structured data, keep your brand facts consistent, and earn mentions where the engines look.
- Measure it by asking a fixed set of buyer questions regularly and tracking whether you're quoted.
what is aeo?
Answer engine optimisation is the work of making your content the answer. An answer engine is anything that responds to a question with an answer instead of a list of links: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, featured snippets and voice assistants.
Where SEO aims for a position in the search results, AEO aims to be quoted, summarised or recommended inside the answer itself, ideally with a link to your page.
why everyone is talking about it
The term is older than ChatGPT, but interest took off in 2026. In the US, searches for "what is aeo" went from 3,600 a month in October 2025 to 6,600 in August 2026, and "what is answer engine optimization" from 210 to 2,400. In the UK the term is smaller: about 800 searches a month for "what is aeo".
| Search | Oct 2025 | Aug 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| what is aeo | 3,600 | 6,600 |
| what is answer engine optimization | 210 | 2,400 |
| aeo agency | 170 | 590 |
| aeo vs seo | 1,900 | 1,900 |
| what is geo | 5,400 | 6,600 |
| ai seo | 8,100 | 4,400 |
The answers themselves are already everywhere. In our own samples of Google results pages for marketing searches, 114 of 139 in the US and UK showed an AI Overview, and 77 of 112 in the Netherlands.
aeo vs seo vs geo
| SEO | AEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank in search results | Be the quoted answer | Be named and recommended in AI answers |
| Comes from | Search engines | Featured snippets and voice search | Generative AI assistants |
| Where you appear | A list of links | An answer box, a spoken answer or an AI answer | A generated answer, sometimes with sources |
| What you measure | Rankings, clicks, conversions | Quotes, snippets, citations | Mentions, descriptions, citations |
In practice AEO and GEO describe the same work, and most agencies use the terms interchangeably. We call it GEO on our service page; the work is identical. Both sit on top of SEO rather than replacing it.
how answer engines choose what to quote
No answer engine publishes its full recipe, but the pattern is consistent: they prefer sources that answer the question directly, are easy to parse, and are trusted elsewhere.
- A direct answer near the top of the page, under a heading that matches the question.
- Clear structure: short paragraphs, lists, and tables for comparisons.
- Structured data that says what the page is and who the organisation behind it is.
- The same facts about your brand on your site, profiles and directories.
- Mentions on sources the engines already trust: industry publications, reviews and comparisons.
how to optimise for aeo
- Make sure you can be found: indexing, speed and a clear site structure come first.
- List the questions your buyers ask, in their words, and answer each one plainly on the page that should be quoted for it.
- Put the answer first: one or two sentences, then the detail.
- Add structured data for your organisation, services, articles and FAQs.
- Check your robots.txt. Blocking AI crawlers can keep you out of the assistants that use them; OpenAI, for example, separates its training crawler (GPTBot) from the one ChatGPT search uses (OAI-SearchBot).
- Earn mentions in the sources answer engines use for your category.
- Measure: run the same 20 to 30 buyer questions through the assistants every month and track whether you're quoted.
how to measure aeo
Rankings don't tell you whether you're the answer. Keep a fixed list of buyer questions, run it through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google each month, and record whether you're mentioned, how you're described and which sources are cited. Answers vary between runs, so look at the trend rather than a single result.
SEO gets you found. AEO gets you quoted.
questions
What does AEO stand for?
Answer engine optimisation (optimization in US spelling): shaping content and brand information so AI assistants and search features use it as the answer.
Is AEO the same as GEO?
In practice, almost. AEO comes from featured snippets and voice search, GEO from generative AI. Both are about being the answer, and the terms are now used interchangeably.
Does AEO replace SEO?
No. Answer engines lean on pages that are crawlable, clear and trusted, which is what SEO builds. AEO adds the question of whether you're quoted in the answer.
Is AEO worth it for a small business?
The basics are. Clear answers to buyer questions, structured data and consistent brand facts help in Google and in AI assistants at the same time.
How long does AEO take?
Assistants that search the web live can pick up page changes quickly. Being mentioned more often across other sources takes months, like building SEO authority.
Sources and data
- Search volume and trends: Google Ads data via DataForSEO, US and UK, pulled 26 September 2026
- AI Overview frequency: our own samples of Google results pages for marketing searches (139 US and UK, 112 Dutch), September 2026
- OpenAI crawlers: OpenAI platform documentation