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 vs AEO vs LLM SEO: the terms, and what is measurableAnswer engine optimization (AEO) is the same aim with the emphasis on being the direct answer, from featured snippets to assistants.
- Agent readiness checkers: Is It Agent Ready? vs CrawlCheckWhen you read any AEO or agent-readiness score, look at which deductions apply to your kind of business before acting on the number.
- How to get your local business recommended by AIThe same study found businesses whose site an agent could read were clearly recommended 1.9 times as often, and answers built from the site were 41% more accurate ( “AX is the New AEO” ).
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 · 772 terms across 19 areas.
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