AEO Answer Engine Optimization

If you’re a digital marketer, you may have caught wind of a new type of search engine optimization. They’ve dubbed it Answer Engine Optimization or AEO.

You’re well aware that consumers and business users are using the Generative AI chatbots (ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft CoPilot) more recently. Instead of typing in keywords, the new search engines encourage longer questions to be asked by searchers. Not only is a question asked, but the search session encourages an interaction that helps them explore, follow a train of thought and drill down for deeper insights. The question we’re asking is “how do you optimize content for answer engines“, and “what is answer engine optimization.” We explore that now.

The Quest is to Answer Questions (and be the one who answers them)

Thus, we have AI LLM answer engines which are growing in use because their specific purpose is to answer questions clearly, accurately, with credible, trustworthy responses to satisfy search user’s intent. Your FAQ pages, product pages, and blog posts need to respond to how the AI LLMs work and what questions users are asking.  We’ll need to do our research.

AEO is a new layer on search engine optimization that content creators, marketers and small business owners should know more about. In this post, I’ll try to present in a fashion that will give you confidence trying to optimize your content for the AI LLM GPTs. It’s important to note however, that AEO is more than SEO. It actually affects the topics, treatments, angles, copywriting, and content experience of users. Because the AI answer engines explore (spidering) content for authority or credibility/trust (E.E.A.T), quality/accuracy, thorough topic coverage, specific key attributes, keywords, and more. They want to ensure your content is the best to refer to, to provide a valid, trusted answer.

Ultimately, the real issue for us as digital marketers (and our clients) is whether our content provides the best answer for user’s questions. In fact, it’s part of a deeper solution of a satisfying search generative experience (SGE) and something called generative experience optimization (GEO).

AI LLM Usage is Leveling Off But Still Growing

Currently, AI LLM GPTs are growing in use, particularly being integrated into various digital products (e.g., travel search engines such as Mindtrip.ai, or real estate apps). There was a big adoption of ChatGPT in schools and university students where most use them daily. The GPTs are great for exploring topics in a guided quest for learning. The rest of the population (older) isn’t jumping on them like the media hype suggests. Google’s search volume hasn’t dropped by much.

Any search in any search engine involving a question is going to activate the whole answer engine process one way or another.  A Google or Bing user might type in “is Portugal an interesting place to visit?“, or “what are the best travel destinations in 2025?”

The results/answers the AI LLM GPTs generate are highly influenced by the material in their database/indexes and how they’ve been trained to respond. They tend to cite authoritative, clear and trustworthy websites which is why advanced SEO is still required. Hopefully, your web content will be among the content they cite in their generated results. As we covered in the SGE and GEO articles, the answers to questions come in different formats. Some are in AI overviews (an answer created by a SGE system), or in what’s called a knowledge panel in the upper right corner of the page. Or they may switch to a full AI LLM GPT involving much deeper and thorough exploration e.g., ChatGPT).

The key to the AEO challenge, is that a Generative AI LLM is taking questions and delivering your answer to customers and web users. So we’re planning, designing, and crafting our content to resonate with the artificial intelligence system’s indexing system. It is SEO. We’re still learning about them, so bookmark this page and return for updates.

Most treat AEO as a ChatGPT/Gemini solution, yet Google search and other search engines create AI-powered answers to questions too. In fact, most people ask questions directly into Google, and let Google guide them forward.

What Is Answer Engine Optimization?

AEO is the practice of planning, designing and perfecting your content so that AI search platforms can directly provide answers to user queries, rather than respond to a keyword search.  AEO focuses on creating content that best answers the questions your prospective customers are likely asking. In general, AEO strategically crafts your content so it is the answer that engines deliver to searchers, whether through featured snippets, voice assistant responses, or AI-powered chat results.

As I said, Generative AI Answer Engines are very helpful, a definite transition in how B2C/B2B consumers search for info, products, and paths to satisfaction.  Answer engines use NLP (neurolinguistic programming) to interpret the context and intent behind questions asked, rather than just matching keywords. The process they use to choose relevant info and evaluate it is very complex.

Modern answer engines leverage machine learning models trained on terrabytes of data. Google uses models like BERT and MUM, while Bing has integrated OpenAI’s GPT-4. These AI LLMs have been trained on material scraped from the WWW, learning language patterns and via factual information to generate answers. They rely somewhat on the Knowledge graph and schema markup language — technical classification systems. If you’re using Yoast SEO plugin, it produces schema markup for your content, and creates a LLM robots text file called llms.txt. This organized description document helps LLMs understand your content.

Since our content is often indexed by Google search algorithm, AEO is still part of your advanced SEO strategy.

Since your content is indexed by AI LLMs, it can influence the answers they create for users and the resources they cite. AEO people want that visibility, however it can generate clickthroughs. For search engine optimization purposes, it can result in backlinks from journalists, bloggers, social influencers, business owners, and others, which boosts authority and ranking power.

Ideally, we might get your site and content featured in an answer, or have your website/page cited in their answer.  While visibility wasn’t respected as much in SEO, it is the only thing left for marketers in the era of ChatGPT and Gemini. These GPTs are not referring visitors to websites, and instead keep users on their platform, and try to be everything to users.

Optimizing for Answer Engines

While AEO is a subset of search engine optimization and generative experience optimization, it’s best for the sake of understanding it to treat it as its own subject. We’ll reduce confusion this way and do a better job.  We’re taking it for granted that we have sufficient “authority” from our backlinks, with our content strategy understood, and that the content does appeal to the target audience, and it’s useful and informational, and solves customers problems.

Using these 10 steps listed below, we make our content appear to be the precise information they want to present to searchers.

Let’s Distill AEO Down to 10 Steps

1. Understand User’s Intent:

• Target specific questions users ask (Who, What, When, Where, Why, How).
• Address informational queries clearly and directly.
• Use tools like AlsoAsked, AnswerThePublic, or Google’s People Also Ask to uncover real user questions.

2. Use Clear, Structured Formatting:

• Use questions in your headings and in the content pages.
• Place the answer following where you posed the question (e.g., in the first sentence or paragraph).
• Use bullet points, numbered lists, and tables when relevant.
• Use H2/H3 headings with natural-language subtopics and questions.

3. Optimize for Featured Snippets:

• Target paragraph snippets with 40–60 word answers.
• Target list snippets with clearly defined steps or ranked items.
• Target table snippets with easy-to-read data structures.

4. Answer More Than One Question:

• Create FAQ sections within pages to cluster related queries.
• Use internal linking and schema markup (FAQPage, HowTo, QAPage).
• Consider a “People Also Ask” inspired section on your site.
• Answer the bigger questions that related to what users are concerned with.

5. Prioritize Clarity and Brevity:

• Use simple, direct language.
• Avoid fluff or jargon unless necessary (and define it).
• Assume the reader (or AI system) wants the answer in under 10 seconds.

6. Use Semantic SEO & Entities:

• Include relevant entities, synonyms, and variations of the keyword.
• Use structured data markup to help machines understand your content.
• Write like you’re explaining to a smart 8th grader—clear, accurate, and unambiguous.

7. Optimize Page Load & Mobile UX:

• Fast-loading pages and mobile-first design affect whether content is used in answer results.
• Good UX reduces bounce rate, which boosts trustworthiness.

8. Focus on E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust):

• Add bylines, credentials, testimonials, sources, and dates.
• Link to credible sources that support your answers to questions.
• Use personal or expert viewpoints when appropriate.
• This boosts your credibility with AI models that summarize and quote sources.

9. Refresh and Update Content Frequently:

• Search engines favor fresh content which means up-to-date answers.
• Update high-performing pages regularly to reflect new data or questions.

10. Monitor and Refine with SERP Feedback:

• Watch how your content appears in Google search, ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini, and tweak based on snippet types shown.
• Use Google Search Console to track keyword and snippet performance.

AEO is a new element of search engine optimization and content strategy. It’s designing and crafting content to answer questions. Anyone interacting with AI LLM GPTs asks a lot of questions, and they respond with content that answers questions.

Clever SEO, guided by intense insights into how AI LLMs process data, helps us build powerful, high performance content.  Because we’re not a library, we’re a business creating customers.

Learn more about high-level SEO techniques and AI guided content strategy, and outsourcing to a Canadian digital marketer.

Title image courtesy of Stockcake.