What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?

Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring content so it can be extracted as a direct answer, in AI assistants, featured snippets and voice results, rather than only ranked as a link. In practice AEO and GEO overlap heavily and are often used interchangeably; where they differ, AEO is the older and narrower term, concerned with any surface that returns an answer instead of a list, while GEO is specific to generative models that synthesise a response from multiple sources. The techniques converge. Both reward a direct answer placed in the first forty words of a section, question-shaped headings that match the phrasing people actually type, clean heading hierarchy that tells an extractor where one answer ends and the next begins, and specific figures with units that a model can quote and attribute rather than paraphrase away.