What is AEO? Answer engine optimisation, without the hype.

AEO stands for answer engine optimisation. It's the work of making sure your business is the one that gets cited, quoted or recommended when someone asks an AI tool a question, whether that's ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity or Copilot. Where SEO is about earning a place in a list of links, AEO is about earning a place in the answer itself.

That's the short version. The longer one is more useful, because AEO has quickly become the most oversold acronym in search. Agencies have rebranded overnight, and plenty of businesses have been told they need an entirely new strategy. Mostly, they don't. They need the one they already have done properly.

What is AEO, and why is it suddenly everywhere?

People are changing how they ask. Instead of typing three words into Google and scanning ten blue links, they're asking full questions and expecting a straight answer back. “Do I need a specialist for a root canal?” “What size stable does a 17 hand horse need?” The answer engine reads the web, pulls together a response, and cites a handful of sources along the way.

If you're one of those sources, you're in front of someone at the exact moment they're making up their mind. If you're not, you might never know the question was asked. That's why AEO matters, and why the noise around it has grown so fast.

How AEO differs from SEO

Less than you've been told. Answer engines still have to find, read and trust your content before they'll cite it, and that depends on the same foundations SEO has always relied on: a site that can be crawled, pages that answer real questions clearly, and enough authority that your word carries weight.

Where it does differ is in the shape of the content. An AI tool isn't choosing a page to send someone to. It's choosing a sentence or a fact to lift. Pages that state things plainly, answer the question near the top and back it up with specifics tend to get used. Pages that bury the answer under three paragraphs of preamble tend to get skipped, however well they rank.

There's also no single ranking to chase. Each AI tool draws on different sources, and the same question can produce different answers from one day to the next. That makes AEO less about a position and more about being consistently present across the questions your customers ask.

What actually gets a business cited

In our experience, a handful of things do most of the work.

Answering the real question, early. Write for the question a customer would actually ask, then answer it in the first couple of sentences. The detail can follow.

Being specific. Figures, prices, timescales, named processes. AI tools favour content that commits to something over content that hedges.

Structured data. Schema markup tells machines exactly what a page is about: the business, the service, the questions it answers. It doesn't guarantee a citation, but it removes the guesswork.

Being mentioned elsewhere. Reviews, directories, press and industry sites all feed the picture an AI tool builds of you. If you only exist on your own website, you're easy to overlook.

Consistency. Your name, services and details should match everywhere they appear. Conflicting information makes an answer engine less confident about citing you.

What AEO looked like for a Harley Street practice

Endocare is a specialist endodontic practice on Harley Street. Their patients rarely start by searching for an endodontist. They start with a worry: a tooth that hurts, a root canal that's failed, a dentist who's suggested a referral. Increasingly, they put that worry to an AI tool before they ever reach Google.

So rather than writing around the practice's name, we rebuilt key pages around the questions patients actually ask, answered each one plainly in the opening lines, added FAQ and dental practice schema, and tidied up the practice's details across the web so every source told the same story.

Within 4 months, Endocare was being cited in AI answers for 11 of the 20 patient questions we track, up from just 2.

None of that was a separate AEO project. It was good search work, shaped for how people now ask.

Do you need an AEO agency?

Probably not a separate one. Splitting SEO and AEO between different people tends to create two half strategies rather than one whole one, because the foundations are shared. What you need is someone looking at how your business is found across all of it: the traditional results, the AI answers, and the places those answers draw from.

That's how we approach it. Not as a new product with a new price tag, but as part of making sure your business stays found as search changes. If you're not sure whether AI tools are mentioning you at all, that's the place to start.