What is Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)?

Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is about structuring your site so AI search engines and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews can lift your content and present it as a direct answer with a citation.

While traditional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) aimed to rank your website, AEO focuses on positioning your content as the clear, credible answer when users and AI bots seek fast solutions.

The evolution of search: From SEO to AEO

For years, traditional SEO has revolved around getting your website to rank highly on a search engine results page (SERP).

The goal was to get a click to your site, where users would then find their answer.

Think of it like a massive library, and SEO was about ensuring your book was on the top shelf, visible for people to pick up.

Now, with the rise of AI-powered search and LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity, the game has shifted.

Users increasingly expect immediate, concise answers directly within the search interface, often without ever clicking through to a website.

This is the essence of AEO.

It’s no longer just about getting your book on the shelf; it’s about having the exact sentence or paragraph from your book pulled out and read aloud as the definitive answer.

This shift has been driven by evolving user behaviour, a preference for quick solutions, and the increasing sophistication of AI.

Voice search for example, long predicted to take off but slow to gain widespread adoption, is finally seeing its moment.

Voice search heavily relies on AI to provide a single, direct answer, which in turn makes the old click-through model less relevant for many queries.

Why should businesses and brands care about Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)?

If you don’t appear in AI-generated answers like ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overview, you’re effectively invisible to a huge amount of potential customers.

This is because AI-generated search results are becoming the default experience for millions of users, and it’s being adopted at a rapid rate.

Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot are gaining significant traction.

The growth of the internet was rapid over decades, but the rise of AI, particularly ChatGPT, has been exponentially faster, achieving in months the kind of global adoption the internet took years to reach.

In 2024, around 58.5% of US and 59.7% of EU Google searches ended in no click, meaning users found answers right on the search results page without visiting any site. Of the clicks that did happen, nearly 30% went to Google’s own properties (like YouTube, Maps, Images), so only 36%–37% reached the open web.

For brands, this means that if your content isn’t cited or included in these AI answers, your visibility can drop to zero.

AEO is therefore crucial for maintaining brand visibility, even when users never leave the results page.

Understanding the key players in the AI space

The existence of multiple AI models, each with different training data, algorithms, and goals, means that optimising for one doesn’t automatically guarantee success across the board.

Each engine has distinct preferences for how it pulls and presents information.

How do Large Language Models (LLMs) work?

LLMs pull information from their vast training data and from live web data.

LLMs favour content from big brands and content that has been frequently ‘seen’ or consumed during its training.

If multiple sources convey the same information in a structured, simple way, LLMs will confidently select that answer.

Unlike traditional SEO that focuses on page rankings, LLMs summarise and compress information, often pulling directly from individual sentences.

If your sentence is the clearest and most consistently repeated version of an idea, it is more likely to be selected.

AI engines’ citations can vary significantly. So what appears on ChatGPT could be completely different to what appears in Google’s AI Overviews or Perplexity. You cannot optimise for AI generically; instead, you must tailor your strategy based on the specific engine.

ChatGPT: This engine is obsessed with institutional authority, favouring established sources like Wikipedia, and aims to provide the highest-confidence answer using the fewest possible tokens (tokens are the smallest units of text like words, parts of words, or punctuation that the AI processes and generates, with the goal of providing the most confident answer using the fewest of these units for efficiency).

ChatGPT primarily pulls from its training data and sometimes live web data (via Bing). ChatGPT values consistent mentions across the web to identify reliable content that sounds like an expert.

Perplexity: This engine actively crawls real-time pages using Bing and summarises information directly from them. It has a notable preference for user-generated content, such as Reddit threads, YouTube comments, LinkedIn posts, and Yelp reviews, seeking out real people discussing real experiences.

If Perplexity starts citing your content, it’s a strong indicator your AEO strategy is effective.

Google AI Overviews: These pull content from indexed pages and are less concerned with domain prestige. Google AI Overviews blends various sources as long as the technical implementation is clean. Structure, schema, and clarity are key for Google’s AI summaries.

Microsoft Copilot: This engine tends to lean heavily towards B2B content, favouring sources like reports and corporate case studies.

The key takeaway is that each AI engine has different citation preferences, meaning content optimised for one might not perform as well on another.

However, to give your content the best opportunity to appear across all AI engines, there are some generic tactics you can adopt.

How to optimise for Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)

1. Target specific questions

This is difficult currently as there aren’t any tools on the market that show you what users are searching for on large language models. However, you can make a start piecing it all together using tools like Semrush and Ahrefs and looking at longer tail searches you’re currently appearing for on Google.

Also use Google’s ‘People Also Ask’ and forums like Reddit to identify real user questions.

2. Provide clear, structured answers

Give concise, factual, and well-structured responses at the beginning of your content. We like to use bullet points as a way to structure our content. Keep your paragraphs short (50–80 words) to boost scannability.

Write in a tone that mimics natural conversation, since answer engines are built on language models.

Avoid clever or overly branded language that might hinder AI interpretation.

Concentrate on semantic relevance and clarity.

Avoid fancy JavaScript frameworks or content hidden behind modals, tabs, or animations.

In short, AEO means writing every paragraph so that AI assistants can ‘lift’ it as a complete answer. LLMs like ChatGPT’s primary goal is to provide the highest-confidence answer using the fewest possible tokens. This means they prioritise speed, reliability, and clarity over exhaustive or creative responses. TRAFCK has found when comparing traditional long-form blog posts with concise paragraphs (under 80 words) that the shorter, focused content received 2–5 times more LLM site crawls. This effectively overturned the traditional belief that longer content is always better.

TRAFCK has found that adding relevant statistics, incorporating credible quotes, and including citations significantly improve visibility in AI responses, enhancing content credibility and richness.

3. Use schema markup

Implement structured data like FAQ schema, HowTo schema, or Q&A schema. This helps answer engines identify key sections of your content.

4. Branded mentions and brand sentiment

Getting your brand mentioned or cited is now key. This is the most important part of an AEO strategy. All brands should be investing in Digital PR.

LLMs tend to favour content from big brands and content that has been frequently ‘seen’ or consumed during its training. Forums on platforms like Reddit, Trip Advisor and Trustpilot are being scraped and used increasingly so reputation management is also a place where brands should be investing.

How to structure an article for AEO

• Use questions in your headers (H2s or H3s).
• Place the answers in the first two lines of a paragraph.
• Use bold summaries at the top of paragraphs.
• Ensure each paragraph starts with the direct answer or data point.
• Keep paragraphs concise, ideally under 80 words, and focused on a single idea.

How do I measure AEO success?

Despite the rapid advancement of AI in search, there is a significant gap in current AEO tooling when it comes to measuring and understanding AI-generated answers.

Currently, there is no direct analytics dashboard (yet) that shows when or how your content is used by generative engines. While tools like Semrush have started monitoring mentions, direct attribution of AI usage remains limited.

Current AEO tools like Profound and Peec analyse where and how often a brand appears in AI-generated responses. However, the primary way of understanding your brand’s AI visibility is through manual testing. This means entering prompts that a customer might use into ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, or Perplexity, and then manually logging whether your brand appeared, what content was cited, and what competitors were mentioned. This process is labour-intensive and doesn’t scale easily but is a service TRAFCK offers.

Traditional rank tracking, often based on logged-out states or hypothetical users, also doesn’t work for AI Mode because of its heavy personalisation. Two users asking the same query may see entirely different answers, making static rank data inaccurate.

The AEO tool market is evolving daily, so getting an early advantage by thinking about your strategy now and implementing some basics will benefit you further down the line.

Quick AEO checklist for your content

• Answer questions in H2s or H3s, and summarise answers in the first 2–3 lines of your paragraphs.
• Ensure you are using schema markup, especially FAQ and HowTo schema.
• Verify that your content is in clean HTML and loads fast, avoiding heavy JavaScript or hidden elements.
• Aim to get mentions in at least 2–3 listicles or external roundups to build consistent brand recognition for AI models.
• Regularly test your visibility on Perplexity, ChatGPT, or Google’s AI Overview to see if your content is being cited.
• Keep each paragraph under 80 words and focused on a single idea.
• Lead with the answer in every paragraph, avoiding fluffy introductions.
• If using data, add the statistic upfront in the first sentence.
• For critical content, ensure it is server-side rendered so AI bots can crawl it without JavaScript.
• Write meta descriptions that directly answer queries, rather than teasing them.
• llms-txt.site: An optional but useful tool for surfacing content to LLM indexes.