GLOSSARY
What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the work of getting your business named and cited when someone asks an AI a question. Instead of ranking a link for a click, the goal is to be one of the two or three names the AI gives in its answer.
Buyers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google AI who to hire, read the answer, and then contact only the two or three names it lists. If you are not one of those names, you are not in the running.
AEO is the on-page half of the work: structure your content so an answer engine can lift a clean, direct answer straight out of it, using clear headings, direct answers, lists, tables, and schema. The off-page half, building the authority that makes a source trusted, is usually called GEO.
AEO sits on top of SEO rather than replacing it. AI answers overwhelmingly cite pages that already rank in normal search, so traditional SEO is the foundation and AEO is the layer that makes a ranking page extractable into an answer.
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Crafted by Aditya Pandey, Agentic AI Labs
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