AI Search & AEO

A growing share of searches now end in an answer rather than a list of links. Google shows AI Overviews above the results, and people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot questions they used to type into a search box. In each case, a model reads a set of sources and writes a response — and the sources it draws from get the credit, the citation, and the click.

Answer engine optimization is the practice of becoming one of those sources. It shares most of its foundation with traditional SEO: a site that cannot be crawled will not be cited, and content nothing links to rarely gets selected. But the unit of optimization changes. Search engines rank pages. Answer engines extract passages. A page can rank well and still never be quoted, because nothing in it stands alone as a clean, liftable answer.

That difference drives everything in this section. Writing that gets cited tends to answer the question in its first two or three sentences, uses headings phrased the way people actually ask, and keeps each passage self-contained enough to make sense when pulled out of context. Structure, clarity, and specificity matter more than keyword placement.

It is also a measurable discipline, which surprises people. You can check whether AI engines mention your brand, track it over time, and see which pages get cited — the same way you would track rankings.

Start with SEO vs AEO vs GEO to get the vocabulary straight, then How to Get Cited by ChatGPT.