The short answer
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of making your content discoverable, extractable, and citable by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, so that when someone asks a question in your category, those engines mention and cite your brand. Where traditional SEO optimizes to rank a page in a list of links, AEO optimizes to be one of the few sources an engine quotes inside a single generated answer.
Why it is a distinct practice
When an AI engine answers a question, it does not show ten ranked links. It composes one response and cites a handful of sources it was able to retrieve, extract an answer from, and trust. That shifts the goal. Ranking first is no longer the finish line; being one of the three or four domains an engine cites is. A page can rank well in classic search and still never appear in AI answers, usually because the engine cannot reach it, cannot cleanly extract an answer from it, or does not treat it as authoritative on that topic.
What AEO adds on top of SEO
- Retrievability. AI crawlers must be allowed to read your pages. That means auditing robots.txt across the AI user agents and publishing an llms.txt so engines know what to read.
- Extractability. The answer to the question should be near the top of the page, stated directly, and marked up with clean headings and JSON-LD so an engine can lift it without guessing.
- Authority and entities. Engines lean on sources they trust. Clear entity signals, corroborating pages, and real authority make yours one of them.
How you measure it
AEO is measured by running your category’s prompts against the engines and recording how often each mentions or cites you (citation rate), your share of those answers versus competitors (share of model), and the sentiment of the mention. Those are the numbers AI citation tracking reports, and they are what tell you whether your AEO work is landing.
See AEO vs traditional SEO for the full comparison, or what is AEO for a deeper primer. To see where your own site stands, run the free AI visibility scan.