Answer engine optimisation AEO

Why it matters

More of your buyers now ask before they search. A parent asks ChatGPT for a shortlist of schools; a founder asks Perplexity which CRM fits a ten-person sales team; someone types a full question into Google and reads the AI Overview instead of the links. The answer names a few businesses and moves on. If yours isn't one of them, you never got the chance to be compared.

AEO doesn't replace SEO. Answer engines build their replies from pages they can find and trust, so the same foundations (crawlable pages, clear structure, a site that loads fast) still carry the weight. AEO is the layer on top: writing and structuring pages so a machine can lift a clean, correct answer out of them, and pick you.

How to improve it

• Start from real questions. Sales calls, WhatsApp chats and Google Search Console queries tell you what people ask. Each important question deserves a page, or a section, that answers it.
• Answer first. Put the direct answer in the first two or three sentences under the question, then explain. Answer engines lift passages, not whole pages.
• Be specific and checkable. Name things precisely, show prices, locations and timings where you can, and cite your sources. Vague pages don't get quoted.
• Get named on other sites. For "best" and "which one" questions, answer engines mostly quote lists, directories and reviews. Profiles on the platforms your buyers read, and genuine reviews, often matter more than another page of your own.
• Measure answer share. Ask the same set of questions on a schedule and track how often you're named.

Common mistakes

• Writing for robots. Stuffed question lists read badly to people, and answer engines are built to prefer what people find useful.
• Hiding the answer. A 600-word intro before the point means someone else's page gets quoted.
• Expecting markup to do it. Keep structured data accurate, but Google says AI features need no special schema, and FAQ rich results ended in May 2026. In an Ahrefs test, adding schema didn't raise AI citations.
• Checking once. AI answers vary from run to run. One screenshot proves nothing; a repeated sample does.