What is AEO?
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring your content, brand data and online reputation so that AI-powered answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude and voice assistants) select your brand as the answer to a user's question and cite you as a source.
Where SEO aims to rank a page in a list of links, AEO aims to be the answer, because AI assistants usually recommend only two to five brands.
Why AEO matters now
Buyers increasingly ask AI assistants instead of scrolling search results. They ask “What's the best CRM for a small agency?” and get one synthesized answer with a short list of names. If your brand isn't in that answer, you never make the shortlist, and you may never even see the lost traffic in your analytics.
A recommendation from an AI assistant also reads like neutral advice, not an ad. That trust makes AI-referred visitors unusually qualified, which is why AEO is becoming a core part of modern marketing alongside SEO.
How answer engines choose which brands to mention
Each engine works a little differently, but most combine three inputs:
- Training data: what the model learned about your brand from the open web: Wikipedia, publications, reviews, forums and your own site.
- Live retrieval: pages the engine searches and reads in real time (Bing for ChatGPT search, Google's index for AI Overviews and Gemini, its own index for Perplexity).
- Trust signals: consistent entity data, structured data, third-party mentions and how directly a page answers the question.
AEO vs SEO vs GEO: what's the difference?
The three overlap, but they optimize for different outcomes:
| SEO | AEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank a page in the list of links | Be the answer the AI gives and cites | Be included in generated AI answers |
| Where it shows | Google & Bing results pages | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, AI Overviews, voice assistants | Generative AI search experiences |
| Optimizes | Keywords, pages, backlinks | Questions, entities, facts, citations | Content that LLMs can synthesize |
| Success metric | Rankings, clicks, traffic | Mentions, citations, AI share of voice | Inclusion rate in AI answers |
The short version: SEO gets you ranked, AEO gets you recommended. The strongest brands do both, because many answer engines still pull from classic search indexes.
The 10-step AEO checklist
Use this checklist to make any website more likely to be cited by AI answer engines:
- 01
Map the questions buyers ask AI
List the real prompts people type into ChatGPT or Perplexity before buying in your category: “best X for Y”, “X vs Y”, “how do I…”.
- 02
Answer first, in 40–60 words
Open each page or section with a direct, self-contained answer. Models lift short, clear passages; they skip throat-clearing intros.
- 03
Use question-shaped headings
Mirror the exact question as an H2 or H3, then answer it right below. This makes passages easy to extract and quote.
- 04
Add structured data
Use Organization, Service or Product, FAQPage and Article schema so engines understand who you are and what each page answers.
- 05
Make your entity consistent
Keep your name, description, category and links identical across your site, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Wikidata, directories and review sites.
- 06
Earn third-party mentions
AI engines trust what others say about you. Get listed in comparison articles, review platforms, industry publications and relevant Reddit or forum threads.
- 07
Publish comparison and ‘best of’ pages
Honest comparisons, alternatives pages and tables are some of the most-cited formats in AI answers.
- 08
Open the door to AI crawlers
Allow GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended in robots.txt, server-render your content and add an llms.txt file.
- 09
Keep content fresh and dated
Engines that browse live favor recently updated pages. Show a visible ‘last updated’ date and refresh key facts regularly.
- 10
Track AI share of voice
Run a fixed set of prompts across every engine on a schedule and track mentions, citations, rank and sentiment over time.
How to measure AEO results
Rankings don't tell you whether AI recommends you. Instead, track a fixed set of buyer prompts across each engine every week and measure:
- AI share of voice: the percentage of answers that mention your brand.
- Citations: how often your pages are linked as a source.
- Recommendation rank: whether you're named first, third or not at all.
- Sentiment and accuracy: whether the AI describes you correctly and positively.
- AI referral traffic: visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and similar sources in your analytics.
Want to know what AI says about your brand today?
Arivacore runs a free AI visibility audit across six AI engines and shows you exactly where you stand.
Get your free AEO audit