What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of optimizing content so AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews name and cite your brand when they answer a question in your category.
Also known as: AEO
Classic SEO optimizes for a ranked list of blue links. AEO optimizes for the single synthesized answer an AI gives — where there is no page two, and being named is everything. When a buyer asks an assistant "what is the best tool for X", it returns three to five brands and the user picks one. AEO is the work of becoming one of those named brands.
The mechanics are different from SEO because the ranking signal is different. Answer engines synthesize from the sources they trust and retrieve, so AEO is less about keywords and on-page markup and more about entity authority: being written about, linked to and mentioned across the sources those engines draw on. Markup (clean structure, schema, llms.txt) helps a model parse you, but it rarely explains why you are or are not named.
In practice AEO means measuring whether engines name you today (visibility and share of voice), finding the queries where competitors are cited and you are not, and closing the authority gap with content and mentions that those engines pick up.
Is AEO the same as SEO?
No. SEO aims for a high rank in a list of links; AEO aims to be named and cited inside a single AI-generated answer. They overlap on content quality and authority but differ on what counts as winning.
How do I measure AEO?
Track how often AI engines name your brand across buyer-intent prompts (visibility), your share of those mentions versus competitors (share of voice), and how often you are cited as a source (citation rate).
AI Brand Visibility & Citations — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini measures your visibility, share of voice and citation rate across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews — no code, pay per run.
Run it on Apify