Marketing
Answer engine optimization
Also called
- AEO
- GEO
- AI search optimization
A growing share of research now ends inside an assistant rather than on a results page. The visitor never clicks, but the sale still happens — which means being the cited source matters even when it produces no session in your analytics.
What earns citation overlaps heavily with what earns rankings, but not entirely. Answer engines favor content that states a claim plainly and early, is structured so a passage can be lifted cleanly, carries machine-readable markup, and is corroborated elsewhere on the open web.
The measurement problem is real and unsolved. You cannot see most of these impressions. The practical approach is to track branded search volume and direct traffic as a proxy, and to periodically ask the major assistants your own category questions and record what they say.
Zero-click research is already a meaningful share of B2B evaluation. Being invisible to assistants means being absent from the shortlist before anyone visits your site.
Commonly misunderstood
What people get wrong
The claim
“AI search is a different discipline from SEO.”
What is actually true
Most of it is the same discipline done properly — clear claims, clean structure, real expertise, valid markup. The genuinely new part is measurement, not craft.
Related terms
Next step
Working through a answer engine optimization decision?
Tell us the situation. We will give you the tradeoffs as we see them, including when the answer is that you do not need what you are being sold.
No pitch deck. A 30-minute conversation about what you are trying to achieve.