// BLOG · 08/11/2026
What is Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)?
Answer Engine Optimisation is the work of making a brand easy for AI assistants to understand, trust and cite when they answer a question. Where SEO aims for a position in a list of links, AEO aims for a place in the answer itself.
Why answers change the game
A search results page shows ten options and lets the reader choose. An AI answer usually names a handful of brands, explains why, and the conversation moves on. If a brand is not in that short list, it is effectively invisible for that question, however well it ranks in search.
How AEO differs from SEO
- The unit is the entity, not the keyword. Models reason about things: a company, a product, a category, and the relationships between them. Clear, consistent facts about the entity matter more than keyword density.
- Many engines, many sources. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot, Google AI Overviews and others each combine training data with their own retrieval. A change that helps in one engine may do nothing in another, so each needs to be measured.
- Citations, not clicks. Success is being named, described accurately and, where the engine cites sources, linked. That is measured as a share of answers rather than a rank.
Where to start
- Measure a baseline. Ask the engines the questions your buyers ask, repeatedly, and record who is named. This is what Share of Model Response captures.
- Fix the facts. Make sure the basics about your organisation and products are stated plainly and consistently on your own site and in the places models learn from.
- Make the site readable to machines. Allow the AI crawlers you want, publish structured data and keep key pages fast and server-rendered. See Letting AI engines read your site.
- Publish content that answers questions. Direct answers, comparisons and specifications are easier to cite than slogans.
- Re-measure. Models and retrieval change often. A regular cadence shows whether the work moved the share and where a competitor is gaining.
How AEON GPTO helps
AEON GPTO runs that loop for you: monitoring across global, search and Chinese language engines, SMR per engine and competitor, a prioritised list of actions, content drafts with schema, and attribution to analytics and CRM data. You can see a first view of your own brand with the free AI visibility scan.