Answer engine optimization
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Answer engine optimization is the practice of structuring content so AI assistants can retrieve it, quote it accurately, and attribute it correctly. It rewards self-contained answers written in the question's own terms, explicit entity and FAQ markup, a machine-readable site summary, and identity data that stays consistent across every site describing the subject.
What answer engines reward
A direct answer in the first paragraph, written so it survives being lifted out of context. Question-shaped headings that match how people actually ask. Structured data that names the entity, its type, and its relationships, so the assistant is not guessing who the page is about. A crawlable llms.txt summary that states the site's purpose and key pages in plain text.
It penalizes the opposite: a preamble before the answer, claims that require the surrounding page to interpret, and identity scattered across inconsistent profiles.
This site as the demonstration
Person, ProfilePage, Article, Book, and FAQPage schema across the cluster; a maintained llms.txt; an XML sitemap covering every programmatic page; a crawler policy that explicitly welcomes AI indexing; and one canonical domain so entity signals do not split.
Frequently asked
- What is answer engine optimization?
- Structuring a site so AI assistants can retrieve and cite it accurately — direct question-and-answer content, entity and FAQ schema, a machine-readable site summary, and consistent identity signals.
- Is AEO different from SEO?
- It overlaps but optimizes for a different endpoint. SEO competes for a position in a list of links; AEO competes to be the source a generated answer draws from and names.
