What is answer engine optimisation (AEO)?
Making your pages easy for AI assistants and AI search features to read, trust and cite when they answer a question.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO), sometimes called generative engine optimisation, is the work of getting your pages cited when people ask AI a question instead of clicking through search results. The targets are AI features in search engines, such as Google's AI Overviews and Bing's Copilot answers, and AI assistants that search the web.
What it looked like for one solo app
Plumerie, a one-person library app, recorded 55,000 Google AI feature impressions between May and September 2026 and 23,500 Bing Copilot citations over six months. Copilot cited it more readily than Google's AI Overviews did. There was no ad spend behind either number.
What actually moved it
Technical basics, fixed once:
- An accurate sitemap and canonical URLs
- Structured data (JSON-LD) on every page type
- AI crawlers allowed in robots.txt
- An llms.txt file
- Sources cited on the page
Writing for answers:
- A direct two-to-three sentence answer at the top of the page
- The questions people actually ask, as headings
- One product paragraph at most
Consistency: prices and product facts identical in the page copy, the structured data and llms.txt. When they disagree, an AI model has no reason to trust any of them.
How it differs from SEO
Traditional SEO competes for a click. AEO competes for a mention inside an answer, which may never produce a click. That makes Layer 1 of the three-layer content model more important, not less: being the source an AI repeats builds recognition even when the visit happens later.
Measure it where you can. Bing Webmaster Tools reports AI citations; Google Search Console reports search appearances. Note what can't be measured rather than guessing. If you'd rather have it done for you, that's the AI-search sprint.