AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the practice of optimizing content to be selected as the direct, synthesized answer by answer engines rather than as one of ten ranked links. It targets three surface families: voice assistants (Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant), Google answer surfaces (Featured Snippets, People Also Ask, AI Overviews) and generative engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot).

AEO is an industry/practitioner term that predates GEO: it originally described optimizing for voice search and Featured Snippets, then broadened with the rise of AI Overviews and LLM search (2023–2024). Mechanically it relies on question-and-answer structure, concise answer blocks, structured data and clear entity definitions so an engine can confidently extract and present a single answer. It overlaps heavily with GEO and LLMO; unlike GEO, it has no single academic definition.