What is Answer Engine Optimisation?
Answer Engine Optimisation, or AEO, is about making your business easy for AI tools and modern search engines to understand, trust and use when they're building an answer for someone.
It's the same underlying idea as SEO, but aimed at a world where a lot of people now ask a question and get a direct answer, rather than a list of ten blue links to click through themselves.
Why this is a different job to ranking on a results page
Traditional SEO is mostly about earning a good position on a search results page: the better you rank, the more people click through to your site and read it themselves.
AI answer tools skip a step. Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and similar tools read a handful of sources, work out what's actually being asked, and hand the person a direct answer, sometimes without them ever visiting a website at all. If your site isn't one of the sources that gets read and understood correctly, you're not in that answer, no matter how good your ranking would otherwise be.
What AEO actually involves
There's no single trick. It's a handful of ordinary things done properly:
Structure — clean headings, correct schema markup, and a page that clearly states what the business is, what it does and where it operates.
Answers — real content that answers the questions customers actually ask, in plain language, near the top of the page rather than buried in the fifth paragraph.
Consistency — your business name, address, phone number and other details saying the same thing everywhere they appear, not just on your own website.
Those three things map fairly directly onto the first three steps of the SORTED framework, if you want the longer version of how it's actually done.
What AEO isn't
It isn't keyword stuffing, and it isn't a magic prompt or setting that makes an AI tool recommend you. Nobody, including us, can guarantee that a specific AI tool will mention a specific business by name. What AEO does is remove the reasons an AI tool would skip over you: unclear structure, missing details, or information that contradicts itself across the web.
It also isn't instant. Search engines and AI systems need time to re-crawl a site and build confidence in the changes before they show up in how those tools describe your business.
Where this fits with what you're already doing
If you've already put work into a decent website and some basic SEO, AEO isn't a separate project bolted on top. It's the next layer: making sure the structure and content underneath your site is something a machine can read as confidently as a person can.
The quickest way to see where your own site stands is to run it through the Once-Over. It checks the specific, measurable things this article talks about and tells you straight what's working and what's worth sorting first.
See where your own site stands
The Once-Over checks the specific things this article talks about, on your actual website, and tells you straight what's worth sorting first.