Answer engine optimization (AEO)

Answer engine optimization is the practice of structuring a site so that an AI answer engine — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini — names it and cites it when someone asks a question it could answer.

It overlaps with SEO and is not the same discipline. Classic SEO competes for a position in a list of ten links. AEO competes for a sentence in a paragraph that mentions two or three companies, where position four does not exist and the click may never happen at all.

What does the work consist of?

Four unglamorous things, in roughly this order of consequence:

• Let the crawlers in. A root-level block in robots.txt ends the conversation before any of the rest can matter.
• Publish machine-readable identity, so a model resolves who you are from fields instead of inferring it from prose.
• Answer the question in the first sentence under the heading, not in the fourth paragraph.
• Ship the text in the HTML. A page assembled in the browser arrives at a crawler as an empty shell.