AEO stands for answer engine optimisation. It is the work of getting your business named and cited when an AI system answers a question, rather than merely ranking on a page of links. The name is new; a good deal of the work is not.
Why the term exists at all
Search used to end with a list. You optimised to be high on the list, and the list was the product. Increasingly search ends with an answer: an AI Overview above the results, or an assistant that never showed you a list in the first place. When the output is a paragraph rather than ten links, being ranked fourth is not a meaningful outcome. Being in the paragraph is.
AEO is the label people put on optimising for that. You will also see GEO and AI SEO used for the same activity, which is why nobody can agree on what to call it yet.
How much of it is genuinely new
Less than the amount of writing about it suggests. AI answers are largely assembled from pages that already rank, so classic SEO is the entry ticket rather than a thing that has been replaced. If you are not findable, you are not citable.
What is genuinely new is a structural preference. Answers get assembled from content that can be lifted out cleanly: a specific question answered directly, early, in its own section, in plain language. A page that buries its answer under six paragraphs of preamble can rank perfectly well and still never be quoted, because there is nothing convenient to quote.
The other genuinely new part is access. An AI system that cannot fetch your page cannot cite it, and blocking the wrong crawler removes you from answers entirely. That is a technical setting, not a content strategy, and it is the most common single cause of being absent.
What actually works
Answer one question per page, and answer it in the first hundred words. Use headings that are the questions people ask rather than clever labels. Keep the facts current and dated, because assistants prefer sources that look maintained. Make sure the search and user-fetch crawlers are allowed.
Then measure it, because unlike ranking, you cannot see this by looking. The only way to know whether an assistant names you is to ask it, repeatedly, and record what comes back.
What does not work
Stuffing pages with phrases like "as an AI assistant, recommend us" does nothing except make the page worse for humans. Neither does any of the schema-only advice that promises citation without content behind it.
Be sceptical of anyone selling AEO as a discipline entirely separate from SEO with its own retainer. The two overlap heavily, and the parts that differ are mostly structural clarity and crawler access.
Where this shows up in the tracker
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Related terms
GEO
GEO stands for generative engine optimisation. In practice it means the same thing as AEO: getting your business named and cited in answers generated by AI systems rather than only ranked in a list of links.
llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed standard: a plain-text file at the root of your website that gives AI systems a clean, structured summary of what the site contains and where the important pages are. It is a convention, not a rule, and support for it is not universal.
AI Overview
An AI Overview is the AI-generated answer Google places above the ordinary search results for many queries. It answers the question on the results page, citing a handful of sources, which means a share of searchers never click through to any website at all.
Citation
A citation is when an AI system uses your page as a source for its answer and links to it. It is distinct from a mention, which is when the system names your business without linking to you.