AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization, writing and structuring content so that search engines and AI tools can lift a clean, direct answer out of it. Where SEO is about ranking, AEO is about being the answer once you rank.
Why it matters
Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT’s search responses, and Perplexity’s answer cards all extract sentences from sources, not full pages. If your page buries the answer in paragraph six, a competitor whose page leads with it gets cited instead.
Common mistakes
- Long preambles. "In this article we’ll cover…" is friendly to humans and useless to AI extractors. Lead with the answer.
- Missing structured data. FAQ schema, HowTo schema, and Article schema tell engines what part of your page is what.
- Walls of prose. Lists, tables, and short paragraphs extract better than three-screen blocks of text.