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What is AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)? Definition and business implications
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is a sub-discipline of GEO, focused on producing direct answers to user questions. It targets answer engines (Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity) that require a concise, sourced response, restituable as is, rather than a page to browse.
AEO differs from GEO by its focus on interrogative queries (“what is”, “how”, “why”, “how much”). Three practices structure AEO. The opening answer sentence: every page dealing with a question must start with a self-contained 30-to-50-word response, immediately extractable. This sentence is the primary candidate for citation by answer engines. FAQ markup: Schema.org FAQPage and Question/Answer blocks make question-answer pairs identifiable for crawlers. Pages with correctly marked-up FAQs have two to four times more chances of being cited by AI Overviews. Factual pertinence: an AEO response must be quantified when possible, sourced when the topic is sensitive, and regularly revised. An obsolete data point is worse than missing data: the engine cites the erroneous data and engages the editorial responsibility of the source site.
Concrete example
A 60-employee legal expertise firm overhauls in 2025 its expertise pages by topic: 80 pages in total. Three AEO adjustments. Each page begins with a 40-word answer sentence to the title question (“What does case law say on imposed remote work?”). FAQPage markup is added in JSON-LD. Pages are updated quarterly. Six months later, the firm is cited in 14 AI Overviews responses per month on average, against zero before. The queries generating these citations do not all produce clicks, but the firm appears as a source in the responses themselves.
See also
Further reading
Sources
- Schema.org official specifications, FAQPage and Question, 2026. https://schema.org/FAQPage
- AI Overviews documentation, Google Search Central, 2025. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features