AEO stands for answer engine optimisation. The goal is to be the answer rather than one of the links under it. That covers Google featured snippets, voice assistants and the AI answers now sitting on top of most results pages.
What counts as an answer engine
Anything that responds with a statement instead of a list. Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Alexa and Siri all qualify. So does the featured snippet, which has been doing this since 2014 and is the easiest place to start because you can see whether you won it.
How answer engines choose a source
They look for a page that answers the specific question cleanly, from a source they have reason to trust, in a format they can extract without guessing. That third condition is where most sites lose.
A page that opens with two paragraphs of context before getting to the point gives the engine nothing to lift. A page that states the answer in the first forty words under a heading matching the question is easy to use. It is not a trick, it is just better writing.
How to write for it
- Put the direct answer immediately after the heading, in one or two sentences, then expand.
- Use the question as the heading, phrased the way a person would ask it.
- Keep definitions self contained so they make sense pulled out of context.
- Use tables for comparisons and numbered steps for processes. Both get extracted cleanly.
- Mark up genuine question and answer sections with FAQ schema so the structure is explicit.
The zero click problem
Win an answer and the searcher often has no reason to click. That is a real cost and worth being honest about. What you get instead is the brand mention, the citation link and the position of being the source the engine trusted. For considered purchases that is frequently worth more than a bounce from a page they skim for eight seconds.
The way to manage it is to target questions where the full answer genuinely needs your page: pricing, comparisons, anything specific to a situation. Our AI search work splits question targets on exactly that basis.
Common questions
Is AEO different from SEO?
It is a subset of it, aimed at a particular result type. The underlying requirements are the same: a crawlable, fast, credible page. AEO adds discipline about structure and directness that ordinary SEO tolerates without.
Does FAQ schema still do anything?
Google withdrew FAQ rich results for most sites in 2023, so it rarely changes how your listing looks. The markup still makes the question and answer structure explicit for anything parsing the page, which includes AI assistants, so it remains worth adding.
How do I know if I have won an answer?
Search Console shows impressions and position for queries where you hold a featured snippet, though it does not label them. For AI answers there is no report, so you check manually against a fixed list of questions on a schedule.
See the short version in our glossary entry for AEO.
