What Is AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)?
SEO gets you found when someone searches. AEO is about whether you get mentioned when someone asks an AI tool a question instead of typing a search term. Increasingly, that's the same audience, asking in a different way.
Optimising for an answer, not a results page.
Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of making sure your business is accurately understood, and ideally recommended, by AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot when someone asks a question your business could answer. Instead of "rank for a keyword," the goal becomes "be the accurate, citable answer to a question."
The mechanics overlap heavily with good SEO: clear structured data, consistent information about who you are and what you do, genuinely useful content, and real signals of credibility like reviews and case studies. AEO isn't a replacement for SEO. It's what happens to SEO's fundamentals when the audience reading your site is sometimes an AI model summarising it for someone else, rather than a person scrolling through it directly.
I ran the test on myself, and didn't like the result.
I asked ChatGPT, in an incognito chat with no prior context, to recommend a digital consultant covering Zoho CRM and SEO. I wasn't mentioned. When I told it my name directly, it also surfaced a different, more established "Stephen Kevan" associated with a completely unrelated business, because that name had a stronger, more consistent presence online.
That's AEO in one example. It had nothing to do with the quality of my work, which the model had no way to evaluate either way. It came down to which entity called "Stephen Kevan" had built the clearest, most consistent digital footprint: the same name and description used everywhere, structured data marking up who I am, and enough credible content and reviews for a model to be confident recommending me specifically.
Consistency and structure, mostly.
In practice, improving AEO comes down to a handful of concrete things, not a mysterious algorithm:
- One consistent name and descriptor, used identically across your website, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, and review platforms, so different sources reinforce the same identity instead of describing several vaguely similar people or businesses.
- Structured data (schema markup) that explicitly tells search and AI systems who you are, what you offer, and how the two connect, rather than leaving it to be inferred from prose.
- Content that answers real questions directly, in plain language, rather than content written primarily to include keywords.
- Genuine third-party signals, like reviews and documented case studies, which give a model a reason to trust a claim rather than just repeat it.
None of it is exotic. Most of it is the same discipline good SEO has always rewarded, applied with the assumption that some of your audience will meet you through a summary an AI model generated, not a page you wrote.
About the author. I'm Stephen Kevan, a Zoho CRM, SEO & AEO consultant. This article describes changes I made directly to my own site and professional profiles after running the blind test above. More about my background →