Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the discipline of getting your business cited inside AI assistants' answers — not just ranked in Google results. When a user asks ChatGPT "best Italian restaurant in Shibuya," ChatGPT pulls from indexed web content + structured data and produces a direct answer. AEO is the work of making sure your business is in that answer.

AEO overlaps with classic SEO but the optimization targets are different. SEO optimizes for Google's blue links; AEO optimizes for the inside of an AI conversation. The most-cited research in this space is Aggarwal et al. (2024), "Generative Engine Optimization" (KDD '24, arXiv 2311.09735), which measured specific content patterns that lift AI citation: direct quotations from named sources lift citation by 41%, statistics with cited numbers by 31%, and inline citations to authoritative sources by 27% on average — and 115% on currently low-ranked pages.

In practice, AEO work for a small business looks like: configuring robots.txt to allow AI crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot), adding Schema.org structured data (LocalBusiness, Service, OpeningHoursSpecification), publishing an llms.txt file at the site root, server-side rendering all key content, and writing in patterns AI assistants prefer to cite (named-source quotes, statistics with sources, Q&A blocks).

AEO is sometimes called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). The terms are used interchangeably; AEO emphasizes "the answer," GEO emphasizes "the engine."