Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)
Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so that AI assistants, voice search and search features such as featured snippets and AI Overviews can lift it as a direct, accurate answer to a question.
How AEO works
Answer engines look for passages that answer a question clearly and can stand on their own. Pages that put the answer first, use the question as a heading and back the answer with specific, sourced facts are easier to use. Research presented at KDD 2024 found that adding statistics, quotations and citations could lift visibility in generative engine answers by up to 40% (Aggarwal et al., GEO, KDD 2024).
Why it matters now
Pew found that around one in five Google searches in March 2025 showed an AI summary, and that people clicked a traditional result in 8% of those visits against 15% without a summary (Pew Research Center, July 2025). If your page is not the source of the answer, fewer people reach it.
AEO and GEO
The terms overlap. AEO grew out of featured snippets and voice search; generative engine optimisation (GEO) focuses on AI models that write answers from several sources. In practice the same work serves both. See our AEO and GEO service.