The work of being named and cited in the answers of engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. It has two halves: making your own site readable and quotable (crawler access, structured data, plain statements of price and scope), and being present on the third-party pages the engines read before they answer.
How it differs from SEO
SEO competes for a position on a page of links; AEO competes for a name in a written answer. SEO is decided by your pages and their links; AEO is decided mostly by other people's pages: review sites, roundups, threads. SEO is measured by rank; AEO by share of answers that name you. Most of the technical work carries over; most of the off-site work is new.
Where to start
With a measurement, so the work is aimed at the questions you are actually absent from. Then the thirteen site checks, which take an afternoon. Then the sources the report shows were cited for your questions, in the order they were cited.
The term behind it: Answer engine
A system that answers a question with a written answer rather than a list of links: ChatGPT with web search, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini with search grounding.
The report scores four: ChatGPT with web search, Perplexity, Gemini with Google Search grounding, and Google AI Overviews. Each is asked every question with the buyer's country set and scored separately, so the split between engines is visible. Answer engine, in full.
Read next
AEO vs SEO: what changes and what carries over · AEO · The generative engine optimisation checklist
Ask it about your own company
Your website, region and work email. The score appears in about three minutes, and the report is a link you keep.