What is AEO (answer engine optimisation)?
AEO is the work of making a page quotable: the answer early, the question visible, the author and date known, the structure marked up. Nothing more mysterious than that.
The short answer
Answer engine optimisation (AEO) means shaping a page so that an answer engine — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, a voice assistant — can lift a correct answer from it and attribute it to you. Search engines rank pages; answer engines quote them. AEO is the second job.
What answer engines look for
From what we see in audits and in sampled answers, a quotable page has five things:
- The answer in the first paragraph. Not after a story, not after a definition of the field. One or two sentences that answer the question the page is about.
- The question as the heading. A heading that reads like the query (“How long does a mountain bike chain last?”) is easier to match than a clever one.
- A named author and a visible date that match the schema. Engines weigh recency and accountability; a page with neither gets skipped for one that has both.
- One topic per page. Pages that answer six questions at once get quoted for none of them.
- Structure an engine can read: short paragraphs, lists where the content is a list, a FAQ block with real questions, Article or FAQPage schema.
What AEO is not
It is not keyword stuffing for robots, and it is not a separate content strategy. A page written for a person in a hurry is already most of the way there. The remaining work is mechanical: move the answer up, make the heading a question, add the author, the date and the schema.
How to check a page
Read the first paragraph and ask: if this were the only text an assistant saw, could it answer the question? Then check that the heading asks the question, that an author and a date are visible and in the schema, and that the FAQ block, if any, holds real questions.
MonoRanks runs the seven objective checks on the 100 most important pages of each audit, and the four editorial ones on up to ten of them, with a model that quotes its evidence. See AEO readiness.
Sources
Common questions
Is AEO different from SEO?
It overlaps. SEO gets the page found and ranked; AEO gets an answer lifted from it. A page can rank well and still be unquotable, and the other way round.
Do I need schema for AEO?
It helps and it is cheap: Article, FAQPage and HowTo schema tell an engine what kind of answer the page holds. It is not enough on its own.
How do I know if it works?
Sample what assistants say when asked your questions and see whether they name you. MonoRanks does that weekly.
About one email a month
What changed in search and AI answers, from what we see in audits. No card, no pitch, one click to leave.