What Is Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)?
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of optimising your content and online presence so that AI-powered answer engines — such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews — include your brand in their responses to user queries.
The term "answer engine" distinguishes AI platforms from traditional search engines. A search engine gives you a list of links. An answer engine gives you a direct answer. As more consumers turn to these platforms for recommendations and research, ensuring your brand appears in their responses has become a critical marketing discipline.
This guide explains what AEO is, how it relates to SEO and GEO, how answer engines select what to recommend, and the practical strategies you can use to improve your visibility.
What Are Answer Engines?
Answer engines are AI-powered platforms that respond to user queries with direct, synthesised answers rather than a list of links. The major answer engines in 2026 include:
- ChatGPT (OpenAI) — The largest general-purpose AI assistant, used by hundreds of millions for everything from product research to professional advice
- Perplexity — A search-first AI platform that provides cited, source-linked answers to queries
- Google AI Overviews — AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of Google search results, reaching the broadest audience of any AI search feature
- Claude (Anthropic) — Favoured by professionals and knowledge workers for its nuanced, detailed responses
- Google Gemini — Integrated across Google's product ecosystem, including Android devices and Google Workspace
Each platform operates differently — different data sources, different citation behaviours, different audiences — but they share a common characteristic: they provide direct answers rather than requiring users to click through to websites and find the information themselves.
How AEO Relates to SEO and GEO
Three overlapping terms describe different aspects of search optimisation in the AI era. Understanding how they relate helps clarify what AEO involves:
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) focuses on traditional search engines. The goal is to rank your web pages in Google and Bing results. SEO has been the standard approach to online visibility for over twenty years.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is the broader term for optimising across all generative AI platforms. It covers any AI system that generates content in response to user queries, including AI assistants, AI-powered writing tools, and any platform that synthesises information from multiple sources.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) focuses specifically on AI-powered answer engines — platforms whose primary purpose is to answer questions directly. AEO is effectively a subset of GEO, concentrated on the platforms that most directly compete with traditional search.
In practice, GEO and AEO are used interchangeably by most marketers. The strategies overlap almost entirely. The distinction is primarily one of framing: AEO emphasises the "answer" aspect — the fact that these platforms deliver direct responses rather than search results — while GEO emphasises the "generative" aspect of how those answers are produced.
For practical purposes, if you are optimising for one, you are optimising for both.
How Answer Engines Select What to Recommend
Understanding how answer engines decide which brands and sources to reference is the foundation of effective AEO. While each platform has its own architecture, several common factors influence source selection:
Source authority and consensus
Answer engines draw from many sources and look for convergent signals. If multiple independent, authoritative sources consistently mention your brand in a given context, the AI gains confidence in recommending you. A single mention on one blog is weak evidence. Consistent mentions across industry publications, review sites, expert analyses, and community forums are strong evidence.
Content clarity and structure
AI systems need to parse and understand your content efficiently. Pages with clear headings, direct statements, well-organised information, and explicit factual claims are easier for answer engines to extract from and cite. Ambiguous, rambling, or poorly structured content is less likely to be referenced even if it contains relevant information.
Freshness and accuracy
Answer engines that use real-time web browsing (Perplexity, ChatGPT with browsing) favour current information. Outdated content with stale statistics or references to past years is less likely to be cited. Even platforms that rely primarily on training data are updated regularly, so keeping your content current matters across all platforms.
Entity recognition
Answer engines build internal representations of brands as entities. The more consistent and well-defined your brand's digital footprint — across your website, directories, structured data, social profiles, and third-party mentions — the more reliably AI systems can identify and recommend you. Inconsistent brand information (different names, descriptions, or claims across sources) reduces the AI's confidence in recommending you.
Citation chains
Some answer engines explicitly cite their sources (Perplexity shows citations prominently; Google AI Overviews link to source pages). Being a cited source in AI answers is particularly valuable because it provides both visibility and a direct link. Content that is structured to be citable — with clear claims, specific data, and authoritative positioning — earns more citations.
Seven Practical AEO Strategies
1. Create comprehensive, well-structured content
This is the most fundamental AEO strategy. For every topic relevant to your business, create content that:
- Directly addresses the questions your target customers ask
- Uses clear headings that mirror natural query language
- Opens sections with direct, factual statements before expanding into detail
- Includes specific data, statistics, and concrete examples
- Is organised logically so AI systems can extract individual sections
The goal is to make your content the most authoritative and comprehensive resource available for your key topics. When your content is genuinely the best available, answer engines are far more likely to reference it.
2. Build topical authority in your niche
Answer engines favour sources that demonstrate deep expertise in a specific area over sources that cover many topics superficially. Build interconnected content clusters around your core topics — a pillar page supported by detailed subtopic pages — that signal comprehensive knowledge in your domain.
Topical authority is not just about volume. It is about depth, consistency, and the quality of connections between your content pieces. A site with twenty deeply researched articles on a single topic carries more weight than a site with two hundred shallow articles across unrelated topics.
3. Get cited on authoritative third-party sites
What others say about you influences answer engines more than what you say about yourself. Invest in:
- Earning mentions in industry publications and respected media outlets
- Building a strong review profile on platforms like Trustpilot, G2, and industry-specific review sites
- Contributing expert content to authoritative third-party sites
- Participating meaningfully in professional communities and forums
- Getting referenced in relevant research, reports, and industry analyses
Each authoritative third-party mention is a signal that answer engines factor into their recommendations.
4. Use structured data and schema markup
Implement comprehensive schema markup on your website to help AI systems understand your content accurately. Key schemas include:
- Organisation — defines your brand entity
- Product/Service — describes what you offer
- FAQ — marks up frequently asked questions (which AI systems often draw from directly)
- Article — provides context about your content
- Review — structures customer feedback
Structured data does not guarantee inclusion in AI answers, but it removes ambiguity about what your content covers and helps answer engines extract accurate information.
5. Optimise for featured snippets
Google's featured snippets — the boxed answers that appear at the top of some search results — serve as a proxy signal for answer engine visibility. Content that earns featured snippets is structured in exactly the way AI systems prefer: direct answers, clear formatting, and authoritative positioning. Google AI Overviews in particular draw heavily from the same content that wins featured snippets.
Format content for featured snippet potential by including direct answer paragraphs, numbered step lists, comparison tables, and definition-style opening sentences.
6. Build a strong presence on high-influence platforms
Certain platforms have disproportionate influence on what answer engines recommend:
- Reddit — AI platforms frequently reference Reddit discussions, particularly for recommendation and comparison queries
- YouTube — Video content increasingly informs AI recommendations, especially for how-to and review queries
- Wikipedia and Wikidata — The most authoritative structured knowledge sources, heavily weighted by all major AI platforms
- Niche industry sites — Domain-specific platforms carry outsized weight within their categories
An active, genuine presence on these platforms strengthens your AEO profile significantly.
7. Monitor your AEO performance with tracking tools
You cannot optimise what you do not measure. AEO performance tracking requires dedicated tools that systematically query AI platforms and record whether your brand appears, how it is described, and which sources are cited.
Manual checking is useful for initial audits but does not scale. AI responses vary between sessions and platforms, so consistent, automated monitoring is essential for understanding trends and measuring the impact of your efforts.
How to Measure AEO Success
Traditional SEO metrics do not capture AEO performance. The metrics that matter for answer engine optimisation are:
- Mention rate — How often AI platforms mention your brand for relevant queries
- Citation rate — How often your content is cited as a source in AI answers
- Share of voice — Your mentions relative to competitors across target queries
- Sentiment — Whether answer engines describe your brand positively, neutrally, or negatively
- Platform coverage — Which answer engines mention you and which do not
- Recommendation position — Whether you are mentioned first in an answer or further down
Tracking these across five major AI platforms requires either significant manual effort or an automated tracking tool. RivalScope monitors your brand across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, providing the data you need to measure and improve your AEO performance.
AEO Is Not a Replacement for SEO
AEO and SEO are complementary disciplines. Strong SEO performance feeds AEO success — pages that rank well in Google are more likely to be referenced by AI platforms. And the content fundamentals that drive both are identical: quality, authority, structure, and relevance.
The businesses that will perform best in the coming years are those that optimise for both traditional search and answer engines simultaneously. The good news is that the overlap between the two is substantial. Investing in genuinely authoritative, well-structured content pays dividends across both channels.
Check how answer engines see your brand — start a free 3-day trial with RivalScope.