Answer
What is Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)?
Short answer
Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of getting your business named and cited inside answers generated by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity. It differs from SEO in emphasis: instead of competing for a position in a list of links, you are competing to be one of the sources a model draws on when it writes a single answer. The three levers that matter most are a clearly defined entity, content structured to be quoted, and independent sources that corroborate your claims.
Why it emerged
Assistants increasingly answer questions without the user visiting any website. When someone asks for the best accountant in Chatswood and receives three names with a short summary, the businesses named capture the enquiry and everyone else is invisible. The traditional measure — ranking position — no longer describes the outcome.
How models choose who to name
Models assemble answers from content they can access, parse and trust. In practice that favours pages where the answer appears early and plainly, headings phrased as real questions, structured data that identifies the business unambiguously, and consistent corroboration across independent sources like directories, review platforms and industry publications.
Where AEO and SEO overlap
Substantially. Crawlability, content quality and authority serve both. The divergence is in structure. SEO tolerates a page that buries its answer under 400 words of introduction; AEO does not. SEO rewards link volume; AEO rewards agreement between sources.
How to measure it
Build a fixed set of 30 to 50 questions your buyers would plausibly ask an assistant, run them monthly across the major engines, and record how often you're named, how you're described, and who is named instead. Individual answers vary between runs, but the mention rate across a large prompt set is stable enough to trend.
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