AEO
AEO is the work of making a page usable as a source by systems that answer questions directly — AI assistants and AI overviews — rather than only listing links. The goal shifts from being clicked to being quoted correctly and attributed.
What it is
Classic SEO competes for a position in a list of links. An answer engine does not show a list — it writes a paragraph and names a few sources. AEO is the work of being one of those sources.
Most of it is not new. It is the old advice about clear structure and answering the question, taken literally, plus the parts that only matter to a machine: headings that say what the section contains, facts stated in one place rather than implied across three, and a page a fetcher can read without executing JavaScript.
Why it matters if you are paying for a website
Because the click you used to get is increasingly answered above you. That is not a reason to panic — the queries that end in a purchase still end in a visit — but it does change what a page has to be good at. A page written to be quoted gets attributed; a page written to be skimmed gets summarised without a name attached.
What actually helps
Four things, in the order they pay off:
Answer in the first two sentences of a section. A model lifting a passage takes a self-contained one. A paragraph that only makes sense after the two before it is not quotable, whatever it says.
Structure the page so sections can be addressed. Headings with stable anchors mean a citation can point at a section rather than at the site root.
Say the numbers. “Fast” is not a fact, “under 2.5 seconds” is. Facts are what get lifted; adjectives get paraphrased away.
Make the page cheap to read. Plain-Markdown alternates and a light HTML page both help here. A page that needs a browser to render its text is a page a fetcher gets nothing from.
What AEO is not
It is not a separate discipline with its own budget, and it is not a reason to rewrite a site. The overlap with ordinary good SEO is most of it, and the parts that are genuinely new — the llms.txt proposal, the Markdown mirrors — are cheap enough to be worth doing without a guarantee attached.
It is also not measurable the way SEO is. There is no Search Console for AI answers: you can see referrals from assistants, and you can ask the systems directly what they say about you, but nobody gets an impressions report. Anyone quoting you an AEO ranking is inventing it.
Related terms
See also
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AEO — How to Optimize Your Website for AI and Answer Engines
Answer Engine Optimization, llms.txt, islands architecture, and speed as conversion currency. A practical guide to optimizing websites for language models and generative search.