Search & AEO
What is Answer Engine Optimization?
SEO helps you rank in Google. AEO optimizes your content to be cited or summarized by AI tools — a growing share of how people now find answers.
What is Answer Engine Optimization?
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring a site so AI tools — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews — can retrieve, cite, or summarize your pages. It sits next to classic SEO, not instead of it. That is why we run SEO and AEO as one service.
People still search Google. They also ask answer engines. If a page is built only for ten blue links, a growing share of discovery never sees it.
How is AEO different from SEO?
SEO helps documents rank in Google. AEO helps passages get extracted and cited by answer engines. They share a technical foundation — crawlability, clear entities, decent content — and they diverge on format: questions, direct answers, and structured data matter more for citation than they do for a classic ranking.
| SEO | AEO |
|---|---|
| Ranks whole pages in Google results | Gets passages cited or summarized by AI tools |
| Keywords, links, Core Web Vitals | Questions, direct answers, FAQ and Article schema |
| Measured in Search Console | Measured as brand and URL mentions across engines |
Ranking well in Google does not guarantee a citation.
What do we change on a site?
We add extractable answers at the top of key pages, match visible FAQs to FAQPage schema, allow AI crawlers in robots.txt, publish llms.txt, and keep Organization and Service entities consistent. Citation tracking sits in the same report as classic rank tracking.
- Answer-first blocks near the top of key pages
- FAQPage schema that matches visible copy
- llms.txt at the root, plus robots.txt that allows AI crawlers
- Entity and knowledge-graph hygiene (Organization, Service, Article)
- Citation tracking across AI platforms, reported next to classic rank tracking
How do we measure AEO?
There is no Search Console for ChatGPT. We track brand and URL mentions across answer engines, pair that with traditional rankings, and put both in one report. Technical SEO movement often shows in 4–8 weeks; citation gains usually take longer as crawlers re-index.
Key takeaways
- AEO is how you get cited by AI answer engines; SEO is how you rank in Google.
- Do both as one plan — they share crawl and entity work, then diverge on Q&A format.
- Put a direct answer in the first screen of important pages.
- Schema must match the words on the page, including FAQs.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need AEO if I already do SEO?
Increasingly yes. They share a foundation, but citation depends on extra signals: structure, Q&A formatting, and crawler access.
Does AEO replace SEO?
No. Answer engines still need a crawlable, entity-clear site. AEO adds format and schema so those pages can be cited, not a replacement stack.
How long before citations show up?
Technical SEO movement often shows in 4–8 weeks. Citation gains usually take longer, because answer engines re-index on their own cadence.