AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)
Definition
AEO is the practice of structuring content and data so AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews cite a business as a source when answering questions, including when no click follows.
Classic SEO competes for a position in a list of links. Answer engines compress that list into a synthesised response, so the objective shifts from ranking to being quoted. That changes the tactics: self-contained definitions, explicit entity relationships, machine-readable schema and claims that can be extracted without surrounding context.
The practical work overlaps heavily with good technical SEO but adds several distinct requirements — answer-first content structure, DefinedTerm and FAQ schema, an llms.txt file, crawl access for AI agents, and consistent factual claims across the site so a model has no conflicting versions to choose between.
Measurement is different too. Share of voice inside AI answers has to be tracked by prompting the assistants directly and recording whether the brand appears and how it is characterised, because no referrer appears in analytics when the answer resolves without a click.
Definitions are free.So is the audit.
Thirty minutes on a call, then a written 5-page plan inside 72 hours showing where this actually applies in your funnel — and what it is worth fixing first.