What is Answer Engine Optimisation?

From SEO to AEO: A shift in how we get found

For decades, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has been a game of feeding the machine—stuffing content with keywords, stacking backlinks, and fine-tuning metadata, all to please the almighty algorithm. Turning search into a numbers game, where rankings and ad budgets dictated visibility—often at the expense of real relevance.

SEO vs AEO: What’s changing in how we get found?

Traditional SEO isn’t dead—yet. But it’s fading fast. People don’t want links; they want answers and ideas. They don’t want clicks, they want context. Most of all, they don’t want to search—they want to find.

We’re entering the era of Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO). Instead of optimising content for traditional search engines, AEO focuses on optimising for AI—platforms like ChatGPT and Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) that synthesise information and deliver direct, conversational answers to users.

What is AEO?

AEO is the practice of making your content easy for AI to find, understand, and reuse. Unlike classic SEO, where users click links, AI agents extract the most relevant parts of your content and embed it directly into their responses.

Large language models (LLMs) and agentic retrieval systems don’t just retrieve links—they synthesise information. They pull from multiple sources, distill key insights, and generate direct responses. Instead of handing users a pile of ranked results, AI-powered search engines serve up fully formed answers—bypassing traditional ranking systems and fundamentally altering how content is discovered and consumed.

This changes the rules: 

• Ranking is replaced by response relevance.
• Links are replaced by summarised insights.
• Clicks are replaced by contextual grounding.

Core AEO strategies for better AI visibility

Successful AEO content follows a new playbook. It’s structured, accessible, and designed for machine understanding:

• AI readability: Clear headings, bullet points, and structured data (like schema.org or HTML tags) allow AI systems to parse and extract meaning easily.
• Contextual depth: Clear, relevant answers that address the user’s intent.
• Multimodal reach: AI doesn’t just read text—it watches videos, listens to audio, and scans PDFs. Optimising across formats increases discoverability.
• Authority and trust: Factually accurate, well-sourced content is more likely to be used by AI agents and cited in generated responses.

Practical innovations fuelling AEO

The rise of AI-native search is already transforming content strategy and enterprise marketing:

• AI crawler optimisation: Techniques like llms.txt files (which summarise entire sites for AI models), screen-reader accessibility, and structured markup help ensure your site is readable by AI.
• Multimodal AI Content Creation (MACC): Transforms a single piece of content into multiple formats—videos, podcasts, articles, FAQs, and translations—expanding its reach.
• Content gap analysis: Using generative AI to stress-test content for completeness, audience alignment, and missing questions ensures your content answers what AI users actually ask.

AI-driven decision making: Why AEO is the new baseline for brands

AEO determines how an organisation shows up in AI-driven decision-making. Businesses that fail to adapt risk being left out of the next generation of search entirely.

Leaders who invest now will gain:

• Higher-quality AI referrals: Users who arrive from AI recommendations are more engaged, with lower bounce rates and higher time-on-site.
• Brand presence in answer results: The content you publish today could become part of tomorrow’s AI training sets—shaping how customers discover and perceive your brand.

Rethinking discoverability

The age of searching is giving way to the age of finding. We’re no longer just creating content for clicks – we’re creating training data for machines that advise, recommend, and decide.

AEO is not a trend—it is a turning point. For enterprises that want to lead in the age of AI, this is the new baseline for digital discoverability—and for earning trust.