Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the process of designing and structuring content so it is discoverable, interpretable, and reusable by AI-powered answer engines. These include large language models (LLMs) and tools built on them, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), Bing Copilot, Perplexity, and Arc Search. The goal of AEO is to get your brand, products, or ideas cited directly in the AI’s generated responses, often before a user even visits your site.
Traditional SEO focused on rankings. AEO focuses on response inclusion. In other words, ensuring your content appears in the generated answers themselves. These systems prioritise clarity, structure, and authority. To qualify, your content must not only be relevant but also formatted in a way that LLMs can easily extract, summarise, or paraphrase.
Best practices for AEO include:
- Writing content that mirrors natural prompts and questions.
- Structuring answers using definition blocks, bullet points, or concise steps.
- Embedding FAQPage, Article, and HowTo schema for answer parsing.
- Publishing on high-authority, frequently indexed platforms.
- Using consistent naming of brands, products, and people for entity resolution.
AEO also considers where content is published. Posting on community forums like Reddit or technical wikis like StackExchange can improve visibility in LLM training sets and retrieval paths.
For example, a fintech company optimising for AEO might rewrite its blog post “Our Approach to Risk Scoring” as “How Does Risk Scoring Work in Fintech?” with a short definition, annotated steps, and linked terms. That structure increases the chance that an LLM will lift its content directly into a user-facing answer.
In short, AEO is how brands compete not for clicks, but for citations in conversation, and that’s where AI influence lives.
