Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the work of structuring a page so AI assistants and search answer features can quote it: a clear question, a self-contained answer, proof beside the claim, and clean structured data. It extends SEO and cannot guarantee citations.
When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI features a question, the answer is assembled from pages those systems can read, trust, and quote. AEO makes your pages easy to quote. In practice that means answer-first writing, entity clarity (who you are, what the page is about), and structured data that matches the visible content.
AEO is not a replacement for SEO. A page still has to be crawlable, indexed, and eligible before any answer feature can use it, and Google's documentation treats AI-feature visibility as ordinary search work: no special file or markup buys placement.
The honest limit: assistants decide what to cite and change behaviour without notice. AEO is measured, before-and-after, on a repeatable set of questions. Anyone guaranteeing citations is guessing.