Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Also known as: AEO
Answer engine optimization structures your content so AI assistants, voice search, and featured snippets can extract direct answers from it.
What it actually means
AEO targets the systems that answer questions rather than list results: voice assistants, featured snippets, and AI chat engines. The craft is structural. Each important question your customers ask gets a page or section that states the answer immediately in one or two plain sentences, then elaborates — the inverted pyramid, not a slow build-up. FAQ sections, schema.org markup, and consistent business facts give machines confident handles to grab. AEO and GEO overlap heavily; the useful distinction is that AEO is about formatting answers extractably, while GEO covers the broader effort of being present and credible across everything AI engines learn from.
A med spa page that opens with 'Botox in Danville typically costs $10–$14 per unit' is answer-engine food — that exact sentence is what gets read aloud by an assistant or quoted by a chatbot.
Related terms
Generative engine optimization is the practice of making your content likely to be cited in AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT and Google.
AI Overviews are Google's AI-generated answers at the top of search results, summarizing sources before any traditional links appear.
llms.txt is a proposed standard file at a website's root that gives AI crawlers a clean, curated summary of the site's most important content.
Google Business Profile is the free listing that controls how your business appears in Google Search and Maps — hours, photos, reviews, and posts.
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