What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?

Last updated: 9/15/2025

There is a new acronym floating around in Digital Marketing: AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization. It’s getting mentioned more and more in conference rooms and on social media, but what actually is it, and is it worth the hype?

Here is the rundown:

What is AEO?

To put it simply, answer engine optimization is all about creating content that easily answers your audience’s biggest questions. Answer engines (like Perplexity and the Google AI Summary) act as the librarians of the Internet: when a user asks an answer engine (AE) a simple question, it quickly produces a straightforward answer, eliminating need to navigate through search results. AEO is the practice of feeding answer engines the right material to make their answers more accurate and help your content get cited in their results.

Why is it important?

Imagine that a potential customer of yours is looking for information about your business. They type a simple question into Google: "What does XYZ business charge for their services?". Years ago, that user would have likely landed on your lead capture from where they would request an estimate from your sales team.

Today, however, it's likely that Google's AI Summary would try to generate an answer based on the available information. No need to for the user visit your website. No need for them to talk to your sales team. Even worse, if you don't have any pricing information on your website, the AI summary would still try to create a satisfactory answer, likely pulling from other online sources that may or may not be accurate.

This is the era of zero click results. Buyers are expecting fast and accurate to every question. If your website isn't providing those answers to answer engines, something else will, and that may be costly to your brand at critical moments. Investing in AEO may help you maintain your competitive edge still stay in front of your audience to answer their biggest questions.

How is it done?

The key to AEO is having the right kinds of content on your website. A solid AEO approach must be based on a thorough understanding of the common questions for your customer. If you know the sorts of questions your customers are asking, then you can answer them online in a way that makes semantic sense and is digestible by answer engines. Doing AEO well takes time and discipline, but the principles are straightforward and easy to learn.

What are the best practices?

Use a Q&A format

Because answer engines are, as the name implies, engines that generate answers, writing in a Q&A format that explicitly addresses specific questions will help your content to get cited when those same questions are asked to the AEs.

Using an AI-friendly structure

Just like human readers, AEs are more likely to understand documents that are well structured and to the point. For more information on how to structure your content for AI, check out our post on Generative Engine Optimization

Optimize for brevity

No one likes to read unnecessarily long articles—AEs included! Make sure that your content is brief and to the point.

Test and improve

Unlike SEO, AEO is very easy to test and optimize quickly. When you create new content, ask various AEs to summarize what you have written. If they fail to produce an accurate summary, get to work on a clearer second draft.

How does it relate to SEO?

The crux of SEO is having a technically-sound website that addresses the right keywords your audience is searching. AEO is very similar, but the algorithms that drive it are much, much smarter. Following technical SEO’s best practices is still very important, but when it comes to search, AEO is focused on context, not keywords. Answer engines interpret web pages like human readers, not keyword-focused algorithms. A successful AEO strategy blends excellent semantic structure that would be perfect for SEO with straightforward content that is designed to directly answer your audience’s questions.

Hopefully this answered your questions about Answer Engine Optimization. If not, go over to an answer engine and ask it to tell you about AEO to see the best practices in action.

If you have more questions about AI for marketing, check out the AI section of our FAQ page.