AEO
Also known as: Answer engine optimisation, GEO, Generative engine optimisation
AEO is the practice of making content likely to be retrieved and cited inside an AI-generated answer.
In full
AEO, or answer engine optimisation, is the practice of structuring a website so that AI systems retrieve and cite it when generating an answer. The related term GEO, generative engine optimisation, originated in academic research and is used more or less interchangeably. AEO shares its foundation with SEO, since content must still be crawlable and credible, but it differs in emphasis. Where SEO competes for a position in a ranked list of links, AEO competes to be the source quoted inside a single synthesised response. In practice that rewards self-contained direct answers, concrete verifiable facts, clear identity signals about the organisation, and allowing the relevant AI crawlers to reach the site at all.
Why it matters
An AI assistant returns one composed answer citing a handful of sources rather than ten links. Being the eighth best result used to mean some traffic; increasingly it means none.
A common misconception
That AEO is a separate discipline requiring separate content. Publishing AI-targeted pages alongside human ones risks breaching search engines' scaled content policies, and the underlying work overlaps heavily with good SEO.