What is AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)?
Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring a business’s content, data, and entity signals so that AI-driven answer surfaces, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, can identify the business and name it in a direct answer. Unlike traditional SEO, the goal is being the answer rather than ranking a link near it.
Why it exists
Search increasingly ends in a summarized answer rather than a list of links. When the answer names three businesses and yours is not among them, the ranking of your page is irrelevant to that search.
What it involves
Consistent entity data across every source, schema markup that states plainly what you do and where, content written in answer-shaped blocks, and an llms.txt file that gives answer engines a clean summary to read.
Why it matters for your business
For a home service contractor, the buying question is literally "who should I hire." AEO decides whether an assistant answers that question with your name or with a competitor’s.