What is answer engine optimisation (AEO), and how is it different from SEO?

Answer engine optimisation, usually shortened to AEO, is the work of helping a business be named and cited when someone asks an AI assistant a buying question. The assistants in view are ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. SEO is the older, still necessary, discipline of being found in a list of search results. They share a technical base. They are not the same job.

This article is for an owner or a marketing lead at a service business. It does not quote a percentage lift, a market-size figure, or a “number of businesses” claim. Where a number would be useful and we do not have a measurement we will stand behind, the number is left out.

What an answer engine actually shows

A traditional search results page is a list. The person scans titles, opens a few sites, and decides. An answer engine writes a paragraph or a short list and, on many of these products, attaches sources. The person may never open your site. They may only see whether your name was in the sentence.

That changes the goal. Ranking in position four still matters for the people who scroll the links. It does not, by itself, put you in the sentence. AEO is the work aimed at the sentence and the citation under it.

The products do not all work the same way, and they change. A useful way to think about them, without pretending to know their private ranking code, is:

• Some answers are written from the model’s general knowledge and carry no live citation. You cannot “optimise a page” into that answer in any way you can check this week.
• Some answers browse the live web, or retrieve from an index, and show links. Those are the answers a page can influence, because a crawler has to fetch something.
• Google’s AI Overviews sit on top of search and cite pages. They are closer to search than a closed chatbot is, and the pages they cite are still web pages.

If a vendor tells you they can force a mention inside a model that is not looking at the web, ask them how they would know, and how you would check. A check you can repeat is: ask the question yourself, note the date, note whether browsing or citations were on, and save the answer.

A definition you can use with a client or a board

Answer engine optimisation is the practice of making a business’s identity, services and explanations easy for an answer engine to retrieve, understand and cite, for the questions real buyers ask.

Four words in that sentence do the work.

Identity. The business has one name, used the same way on the site, in profiles, and in the copy. A model that sees three versions of the name has a weaker reason to trust any of them.

Services. The pages say what you do, who it is for, and where you do it. “Solutions” is not a service. “Commercial kitchen installation in Gauteng” is.

Explanations. A page that answers a specific question is easier to quote than a page that repeats a slogan. The quote is often a sentence near the start, not a phrase buried in a footer.

Questions real buyers ask. The list is short and slightly awkward, because buyers are slightly awkward. “Best payroll bureau for a 40-person firm in Manchester” is a question. “Innovative synergistic payroll” is not.

How this differs from SEO

SEO, search engine optimisation, is the practice of making pages eligible and competitive in web search. It covers crawling, indexation, titles, internal links, page speed, and content that matches a query. A good SEO programme also earns links and mentions because other sites have a reason to refer to you. None of that has been cancelled.

The practical differences:

• The result you are aiming at. SEO watches rankings, impressions and clicks in search. AEO watches whether an assistant names you, and which URL it cites, for a fixed list of questions.
• The shape of the page. A search page can win with a thorough guide. An answer citation often comes from the part of the page that answers in a few clear sentences, then supports the claim. Both can live on the same URL. The first screen has to make sense on its own.
• The identity of the business. Search can rank a page that never quite says who the company is. An assistant that has to recommend “a firm” needs an entity: a name, a place, a service, and pages that agree with each other.
• What “technical” means. Both need the page to be fetchable. AEO is less forgiving of sites that only paint their text with JavaScript. If you view the source, or fetch the URL with a tool that does not run scripts, and the heading is missing, you have a problem for any crawler that does not render.
• What you must not promise. SEO already had a bad habit of guaranteeing positions. AEO has the same habit, with a new vocabulary. A citation is a choice the product makes on the day you ask. It is not a deliverable you can put in a contract without turning the contract into fiction.

The overlap is worth paying for once. A page that cannot be crawled will not be cited. A title that does not describe the page will not be selected. Fixing that is SEO, and it is also the start of AEO.

What does not transfer from old SEO advice

Some advice that still circulates will waste a quarter if you follow it for AEO.

Word count is not a quality threshold. A 2,000-word page that never answers the question is worse than a 700-word page that does. We do not use a minimum word count as a rule, on our site or in client work.

“LSI keywords” are not a thing you should brief a writer to sprinkle. Related language appears because you explained the subject properly. If a sentence exists only to repeat a synonym, delete it.

Publishing a fixed number of articles every day, with nobody reading them, fills a site with pages you cannot defend. A smaller set of pages, each tied to a question you can name, is the workable version.

Guaranteed counts of backlinks, and guaranteed logos of famous magazines, are a commercial claim, not a technique. They also sit badly next to the policies of the search engines you still depend on. If a mention in the press is part of the work, it is a pitch, and the editor decides.

What a service business can do before hiring anyone

You can learn a lot in an afternoon, and the notes are the brief if you later hire help.

Write ten questions a serious buyer would ask an assistant before they email you. Include the country or city if the work is local. Include one comparison with a competitor you actually lose to. Do not invent a flattering question nobody asks.

Ask those questions in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and, where you can, Google with AI Overviews. Save the date, the exact wording, and whether you were named. Save who was named instead, and which links were shown. That is your baseline. It will not be stable from one day to the next. That is why you keep the wording fixed and look for a pattern over several checks, not a single screenshot.

Open your homepage and your main service page with “view source”, or fetch them with a command that does not run JavaScript. If the heading and the first explanation are in that HTML, a simple crawler can read them. If the body is an empty shell, that is the first fix, ahead of any new article.

Read the name, the service and the location on the homepage, the service page, the footer and any profile you link to. If they disagree, pick the true version and make the others match. Do not add a phone number or a street address you do not want published. An assistant will repeat what you publish.

Look at the pages you already have that try to explain the service. Move a direct answer up. Say who the service is for, and who it is not for. Name the places you actually work. Link to the next most useful page on your own site.

How a managed engagement is different from a tool

A tool can list queries, fetch a page, or draft a paragraph. It cannot tell you which question is worth winning, and it should not be allowed to publish onto a client’s domain without a person reading it. The managed version of this work is a person agreeing the questions, a person editing the pages, and a written record of what the assistants said.

The record matters more than a dashboard score. A score with no prompt behind it cannot be audited. A prompt, a date, an assistant, and a yes or no can be.

If you are comparing proposals, ask each firm to show you one month of that record for a client who has agreed to be discussed, or to do the free version on your own site. Ask what they will not guarantee. The useful answer includes rankings, citations, and press logos.

Where SEO still earns its place

Buyers have not stopped searching. A service business that ignores titles, indexation and internal links will lose the clicks it still gets, and it will also be a weaker source for the assistants that cite the web. Treat SEO as the layer that makes the site readable and findable. Treat AEO as the layer that decides which questions the readable pages are supposed to answer, and that checks whether the assistants use them.

On our own site, the managed offer is answer engine optimisation, with search work inside it when the pages need it. The pricing page is the fee list. The longer practical version of “how do we get into ChatGPT’s answer” is the companion article, How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT.

That is answer engine optimisation. SEO remains the work of being found in search. Do both, and do not let a new acronym talk you into a guarantee.