AEO
Optimising to be quoted inside a generated answer rather than ranked in a list of links. The practices overlap heavily with SEO; what differs is the outcome measured.
What AEO means
No engine publishes a ranking function for answers, so any claim to optimise for one is inference from correlation.
Where AEO comes up on this site
- GEO, AEO, LLM SEO and the agentic web: what the terms mean and which parts can be measuredGenerative engine optimization (GEO) , answer engine optimization (AEO) and LLM SEO are three names for the same shift: a growing share of questions about your business are now answered without anyone visiting your site.
- Generic AEO scores penalise sites for checks that do not apply to themA checker that gives every site the same list is measuring the list, not the site.
- Free AI visibility checkers: what the free tier actually measuresWhen an AI visibility tool grades your WAF Generic AEO scores penalise sites for checks that do not apply to them When an LLM summarises your audit report and gets the grade wrong
- Text-to-HTML ratio: when a page is mostly codeOur caching guide covers the edge-cache side, which decides whether a slimmer page is actually what crawlers receive, and the AEO audit page reads this finding next to the other delivery checks.
Terms this definition uses
Definitions that name AEO
Related terms in Answer engines and retrieval
How a generated answer gets made, and what your page is competing for inside it.
GEO · AI visibility score · share of voice · prompt set · brand mention · RAG · grounding · training data · embedding · chunking · context window · token · hallucination · refusal · AI Overview · answer engine · citation · retrieval · hallucinated attribution · Hybrid search · Re-ranking · Passage ranking · Query fan-out · Chunk boundary · BM25 · cross-encoder · AI Mode · information gain · dense retrieval
Questions about AEO
What is AEO?
Optimising to be quoted inside a generated answer rather than ranked in a list of links. The practices overlap heavily with SEO; what differs is the outcome measured.
What does AEO not show or guarantee?
Optimising to be quoted inside a generated answer rather than ranked in a list of links.
Which area of the glossary does AEO belong to?
Answer engines and retrieval: How a generated answer gets made, and what your page is competing for inside it.
GEO →
See it in the full glossary · 731 terms across 19 areas.