What is AEO
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring a website so that AI-powered search engines, like Perplexity, ChatGPT Search, and Google AI Overviews, can read, cite, and surface its content in direct answers. Where traditional SEO earns a blue link, AEO earns the paragraph that appears before any links at all.
The shift already happened: A growing share of informational and commercial queries now resolve inside an AI answer panel. If your site is not structured to be cited, you are invisible to a widening slice of your market, regardless of where you rank in the ten blue links below.
Structure is the lever: AI engines prefer content that names its claims, cites its sources, and uses semantic markup. That means clear headings, concise definitions, FAQ schema, and clean internal linking. None of it requires a content calendar rewrite, just purposeful architecture.
AEO and SEO compound together: The signals that make a page citable by an AI engine overlap almost entirely with the signals that make it rank organically. Investing in one strengthens the other, so the lift compounds across both channels over time.