Journal What is AEO?
AEO, Answer Engine Optimisation, is the work of making your brand the one AI assistants name when buyers ask about your category. It is also called GEO, Generative Engine Optimisation. SEO earns your page a place in a list of links; AEO earns your brand a mention inside the answer itself.
The guide
Why it matters in B2B
Buyers now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google AI Overviews for a shortlist before they visit a single vendor’s site. The answer names a handful of brands and explains why. If yours is not one of them, you are not on the list, however good your site is.
That makes the answer the new first impression. AEO is how you work on it on purpose, instead of leaving it to whatever the engines happen to have read.
What the work involves
AEO is five steps, repeated:
- Find the questions your buyers actually ask, such as “best X for Y”, “alternatives to the market leader” and “how much does X cost”.
- Ask those questions across the engines and record who they name today. This is the baseline.
- Rewrite the pages and FAQs that should answer them, answer first, with schema so the facts are machine-readable.
- Earn mentions on the third-party pages the engines read: comparison articles, directories, reviews.
- Ask the same questions again each month and report what changed, with the date of every answer.
What an answer-first page looks like
The question is the heading. The first one or two sentences answer it outright. The detail follows. Facts a buyer needs to shortlist you (what it costs, who it is for, how it works, how long it takes) are stated plainly, not hidden behind “contact us”.
This page is written that way: the definition is the first thing you read.
How you measure it
With a fixed set of buyer questions, asked across the same four engines every month. Each answer is marked Cited (you are named and linked as a source), Mentioned (named, not linked) or Absent. The report also shows your share of citations against your top three competitors. See a sample monthly report.
What AEO cannot do
No one controls what an engine writes. Answers are generated fresh each time and can change with the wording, the person asking and the day. What you can control are the inputs the engines read: your pages, how they are structured, and what other sites say about you. That is why AEO is measured as a trend over a fixed set of questions, never by a single screenshot.
By Rouge Flamingo · Published · 3 min read
Questions
Is AEO the same as GEO?
Yes, in practice. GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is another name for the same work: getting AI engines to name you in the answers they write.
Does AEO replace SEO?
No. It builds on it. A page an engine cannot crawl or read cannot be cited, so the technical basics of SEO still apply.
How long does AEO take?
Citations build over months, not days. Our pilot runs for 90 days, with a baseline at the start and a report every month.
Read next
AEO vs SEO
SEO gets your page ranked in a list of links. AEO gets your brand named inside the answer an AI assistant writes. They share a foundation, pages that are easy to crawl and read, but AEO is judged by whether the answer names you, not by where a page ranks.
How AI engines choose which brands to name
No engine publishes exactly how it chooses. But every answer is built from what the engine has read, so three inputs are yours to change: whether your own pages answer the question plainly, whether your facts agree everywhere they appear, and whether other sites the engine trusts mention you.