Answer Engine Optimization
The practice of structuring content so AI-powered search systems extract and cite it when generating responses to user queries.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) adapts SEO principles for AI-driven discovery systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Rather than optimizing for ranking position in a list of blue links, AEO focuses on making content extractable by retrieval-augmented generation pipelines — through answer-first structure, schema markup, crawler access, and E-E-A-T authority signals — so that language models select and cite it when synthesizing answers.
Also known as
AEO, answer engine optimization, AI search optimization, LLM optimization