Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Also known as: AEO
Answer engine optimization structures your content so AI assistants, voice search, and featured snippets can extract direct answers from it.
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What it actually means
AEO targets the systems that answer questions rather than list results: voice assistants, featured snippets, and AI chat engines. The craft is structural. Each important question your customers ask gets a page or section that states the answer immediately in one or two plain sentences, then elaborates — the inverted pyramid, not a slow build-up. FAQ sections, schema.org markup, and consistent business facts give machines confident handles to grab. AEO and GEO overlap heavily; the useful distinction is that AEO is about formatting answers extractably, while GEO covers the broader effort of being present and credible across everything AI engines learn from.
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A med spa page that opens with 'Botox in Danville typically costs $10–$14 per unit' is answer-engine food — that exact sentence is what gets read aloud by an assistant or quoted by a chatbot.
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Related terms
Generative engine optimization is the practice of making your content likely to be cited in AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT and Google.
AI Overviews are Google's AI-generated answers at the top of search results, summarizing sources before any traditional links appear.
llms.txt is a proposed standard file at a website's root that gives AI crawlers a clean, curated summary of the site's most important content.
Google Business Profile is the free listing that controls how your business appears in Google Search and Maps — hours, photos, reviews, and posts.
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